This just in from Arthur N. Westover, M.D., of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas: Meth will eff you up. Cocaine too. Pretty much any stimulant. Eff. You. Up. Like, stroke eff-you-up. Stroke.
Those are the conclusions Westover and his colleagues -- including Robert Haley, M.D. -- reached in a piece published in the April issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. As in, let's test whether "young adults who abuse amphetamines or cocaine are at a higher risk of stroke." And, as in, "Yeah, they are."
Now, I don't know what this means, exactly, but they "used a database of 3,148,165 discharges from Texas hospitals between 2000 and 2003 to assess the connection between drug use and strokes. Strokes and drug dependence or abuse were identified by clinical codes. In the four-year period, there were 8,369 strokes: 1,887 in 2000, 2,097 in 2001, 2,133 in 2002 and 2,252 in 2003. Cocaine was the second most frequently abused drug after alcohol, and amphetamines were the fifth; abuse of both, as well as cannabis and opioids, increased significantly." But it sounds bad. Except, maybe, the alcohol part. And the thing about the cannabis. But, other than that, bad. --Robert Wilonsky