Few lifestyle factors linked to unruptured intracranial aneurisms

Smoking, female sex and hypertension raise risk but diet, alcohol and exercise have no association
Clare Pain
middle-aged woman smoking

A large imaging study in a population-based cohort has drawn a blank when it comes to finding new modifiable lifestyle factors that could reduce the risk of developing intracranial aneurisms.

Known risk factors for CVD, such as alcohol intake, diet quality and exercise, do not appear to affect the risk of having an unruptured aneurism, the Dutch authors report.

But the results back up previous research which has implicated hypertension, female sex and smoking as being associated with presence of unruptured aneurisms in the brain.

The investigators examined brain MRI scans performed at a mean age of 64 years in 5841 participants in the Rotterdam study (a general population cohort) and looked for intact intracranial aneurisms.