WEDNESDAY, Sept. 30 (HealthDay News) -- In patients with acute stroke, only one in eight have a warning from a prior transient ischemic attack, according to a study published in the September issue of Neurology.

Daniel G. Hackam, M.D., of the Stroke Prevention and Atherosclerosis Research Centre in London, Canada, and colleagues analyzed data from the Registry of the Canadian Stroke Network on 16,409 patients with a final diagnosis of acute stroke.

The researchers found that only 2,032 (12.4 percent) of subjects had a prior transient ischemic attack. They also found that a prior transient ischemic attack was most likely to have occurred in patients with a large artery ischemic stroke (20.5 percent) and least likely to have occurred in patients with a hemorrhagic stroke (4.6 percent), and that patients with a prior transient ischemic attack were less likely to die during hospitalization (12.7 versus 15.2 percent), have an in-hospital cardiorespiratory arrest (3.1 versus 4.8 percent), or seizure (1.5 versus 2.7 percent).

"Widely implemented urgent transient ischemic attack clinics might therefore prevent a small but significant fraction of the current stroke burden," the authors conclude. "In addition, these data highlight a need for risk profiles that accurately identify and stratify individual risk for first stroke."

One author reported financial relationships with Ferrer Group and Boehringer-Ingelheim.

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