Smoking linked to bleeding in the brain in large, long-term study of twins

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/aha-slt091420.php

News Release 17-Sep-2020
American Heart Association

An investigation of the Finnish Twin Cohort reaffirmed a link between smoking and subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a type of bleeding stroke that occurs under the membrane that covers the brain and is frequently fatal. The new study by researchers in Finland is published today in Stroke, a journal of the American Stroke Association, a division of the American Heart Association.

In a 2010 study of nearly 80,000 twins from Denmark, Finland and Sweden, results suggested that SAH had more to do with external risk factors and very little to do with genetic influence. Twins share either all or half their genes (identical vs. fraternal) so they are valuable for studies designed to evaluate the role of genetics versus environmental factors in disease development.

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