Can Your Risk Of Stroke Really Decrease By Being Wealthier?

In a recent study of people between the ages of 50-64, those that were more wealthy had less risk of stroke. “We confirmed that lower wealth, education and income are associated with increased stroke up to age 65, and wealth is the strongest predictor of stroke among the factors we looked at,” stated Dr. Mauricio Avendano of the Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

“After age 65, the association of education, income and wealth with stroke are very weak, and wealth did not clearly predict stroke,” said Avendano. According to the American Heart Association every year there are about 780,000 strokes in Americans and 27 percent of them happen before the age of 65.

In an ongoing study of 19,445 Americans at the University of Michigan, all of those were stroke going in to the study. The lower 10 percent of the wealth classification had 3 times as many strokes as those of the higher wealth classification. Basically, the more wealthy they were, the less likely they were to have a stroke.

“Lack of material resources themselves, and particularly wealth, appear to strongly influence people’s chances to have a first stroke,” Avendano said. “From a public health perspective, this would mean that diminishing the large wealth gap at age 50-64 also could help diminish the large disparities in stroke.”

This is no surprise to me. Most of the worries in the people whom I know and work with are usually associated with money. We are in a world driven by money like it or not. So, what are your options? Become wealthy to be more healthy? I think not! Although it may help reduce your chance of a stroke, you are more likely to achieve better overall health by working on the inner principals of health.

If you have more inner peace and true happiness, you will naturally be less stressed about money and other material factors that control peoples lives. All your external suffering and worldly problems come from what’s going on inside your mind. Until our world starts becoming more educated on this and starts doing something about it, we will continue to endure the suffering of anger, resentment, jealously, war and the many other things that continue to tear our world apart.

This study to me is just another failed human attempt at making the world healthier without doing the work necessary to achieve it. More reinforcement that we don’t need telling us that money is going to solve our problems. It’s no wonder we think the way we do.