Hi everybody, we have our first Aintree hospital stroke prevention patient education session on Wednesday at 1:00 p.m. We've invited people who've had a stroke at the point of being discharged from hospital. This is our first attempt and we haven't had many responses so there are still a few slots in that meeting. If anybody here is interested in joining us either for their own learning or to help by giving us feedback on how we can improve the sessions, you'd be very welcome. Please let me know and we can give you further details.

Happy Saturday everybody! Just a quick reminder that we have our monthly prevention catch up tomorrow at 6pm. Link in the calendar section of the website. A chance for us to catch up, see how everybody's getting on and talk about what we're going to do this month to reduce our stroke risk. Feel free to bring your blood pressure monitors along and share your latest blood pressure too!

This isn’t strictly a stroke-prevention post. It’s a dementia-prevention post. But Stroke‑Proof is ultimately about protecting the brain—and looking after your hearing and eyesight may be a more important part of that than most people realise. The 2024 Lancet Commission estimated that addressing 14 modifiable risk factors could potentially prevent or delay around 45% of dementia cases. Two of those factors involve our senses: 👂 Hearing loss in midlife was estimated to account for around 7% of dementia cases at population level. 👁️ Untreated vision loss in later life was estimated to account for around 2%. Why might our senses affect the health of our brain? Think about how much stimulation reaches your brain through your eyes and ears. Every conversation you follow, face you recognise, book you read and environment you navigate activates complex networks of brain cells. When hearing or vision deteriorates, several things may happen: • The brain receives less sensory stimulation. • It has to work harder to interpret incomplete information. • People may withdraw from conversations and social activities. • Reading, exercise, travel and other cognitively stimulating activities can become more difficult. • Reduced input may contribute to changes in the brain regions that process sensory information. It may therefore be partly a case of maintaining the connections that keep our brain circuits active—continuing to stimulate the wiring rather than gradually allowing those pathways to become less active. In the ACHIEVE randomised trial, treating hearing loss did not significantly slow cognitive decline across the entire study population. However, among participants already at higher risk of cognitive decline, a hearing intervention slowed cognitive decline by 48% over three years. For vision, one study of more than 3,000 older adults with cataracts found that cataract surgery was associated with a 29% lower risk of subsequently developing dementia. That cannot prove that the surgery caused the reduction, but it strengthens the case for taking treatable vision loss seriously.

At the group I am organising speaker's from time to time Can anyone recommend anyone who would eto come along .

Why glucose stability may matter in type 2 diabetes. This week for our Stroke Prevention tip Professor Chatterjee has written fantastic post about glucose variability and why it matters for stroke risk. There are some excellent diagrams in the post that I couldn't post into the text window, so instead I've uploaded the whole post as a PDF that you can read by clicking the link below. Enjoy!