Seniors Often Misstate Stroke History

MONDAY, May 11 (HealthDay News) -- Many seniors who've had a stroke fail to report that fact, say researchers who recommend the use of MRI scans rather than patient self-reporting to determine stroke history.

The study included 717 Medicare recipients aged 65 years and older (average age 80.1) in Manhattan. They or their caregivers completed a questionnaire about stroke history, including whether they'd ever had symptoms of stroke or been told by a doctor that they had a stroke.

On the questionnaire, 85 participants (11.9 percent) reported a history of stroke, but MRI scans found evidence of stroke in 225 participants (31.4 percent).

The sensitivity of stroke -- number of people who reported having a stroke divided by the total number of those with stroke detected on MRI -- was 32.4 percent. The specificity -- number of people who reported having no history of stroke divided by the total number of those with no evidence of stroke detected on MRI -- was 78.9 percent.

"Lower functioning memory, cognitive or language ability or presence of hypertension [high blood pressure] or myocardial infarction [heart attack] were associated with an increased frequency of false-negative reports," study author Dr. Christiane Reitz, of Columbia University Medical Center in New York City, wrote in a news release from the journal.

"Our results indicate that sensitivity and specificity of stroke self-report are low when using MRI scans as validation," the researchers concluded. "In stroke research, sensitive neuroimaging techniques rather than stroke self-report should be used to determine stroke history."

The study appears online and in the July print issue of the Archives of Neurology.