Age: its significance in nonembolic cerebral infarction.

Abstract

The frequency of occurrence of nonembolic cerebral infarction is linearly related to age. The sexual frequency of nonembolic cerebral infarction is directly related to the age group of the sample studied. The mortality of nonembolic cerebral infarction and its prognosis are most closely related to the age of the patient at the time of stroke. The older the patient, the higher is the mortality and the poorer the prognosis. The cause of death in nonembolic cerebral infarction is as much a function of age-related concurrent diseases, especially cardiac disease, as it is of stroke itself. The natural history of stroke is more related to the natural history of cardiac disease than it is to cerebral vascular disease. These data may be viewed as lending support to the thesis that nonembolic cerebral infarction and the diseases that are frequently found with it, such as diabetes, cardiac disease and hypertension, are related in their occurrence and mortality to aging and may truly be concurrent events and not etiologically related one to the other.