Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, February 25, 1991                   TAG: 9102250028
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO                                LENGTH: Medium

STUDY: SMOKING LINKED TO STROKE, ARTERIAL DAMAGE

A 50-year-old who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day has artery damage comparable to a light smoker 10 years older, said Dr. Robert Dempsey, a neurosurgeon at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

"The effect in that 50-year-old would be to take 10 years off his life," Dempsey said Saturday at the American Heart Association's annual meeting on strokes.

In a separate study, researchers found those who smoked a pack a day or less were four times as likely as non-smokers to suffer from the form of stroke called subarachnoid hemorrhage, which occurs primarily in people younger than 65 and more commonly in women. It has a high death rate.

Those who smoked more than a pack a day had up to 11 times the risk of subarachnoid hemorrhages, which make up 7 percent of the 500,000 strokes suffered by Americans each year.

Dr. Will Longstreth, the study's author, said that the risk is especially high within three hours of smoking a cigarette, and then it falls off gradually. But smokers continue to have a higher risk of this kind of stroke even years after they give up cigarettes, said Longstreth, a neurologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

His findings were based on study of 149 stroke victims and 149 people of similar backgrounds who had not had strokes. He concluded that smoking is responsible for about 38 percent of all subarachnoid hemorrhages.

He said that more than 8,000 such strokes could be prevented each year in the United States with the elimination of smoking.

In the other study, Dempsey made use of a special ultrasound scanner to determine the thickness of waxy deposits building up inside the carotid artery, one of the principal suppliers of blood to the brain.

These deposits can ultimately diminish or block blood flow to parts of the brain, causing strokes.

Dempsey found in an examination of 790 patients that the thickness of the deposits, called plaques, was directly related to the amount that smokers had smoked over their lifetimes. "Heavy smokers have much more plaque in their carotid arteries than non-smokers," he said.