3 Habits A Neurologist Avoids To Lower Stroke Risk

We’ve written before at HuffPost UK about why some neurologists recommend avoiding GPS while driving and ensuring your kids don’t run around with toothbrushes in their mouths.

In a recent TikTok video, neurologist Dr Baibing Cheng (known online as Dr Bing) said: “I’ve seen strokes caused by things people do every day.”

These include your choice of drinks and the way you breathe while working out.

Here, he shared “three things I don’t do as a neurologist, because I’ve seen strokes happen this way”.

Stating that he prefers to stick to coffee to raise his energy levels, Dr Bing said energy drinks can contain very concentrated levels of caffeine.

The BBC previously reported that some supermarket energy drinks contain the maximum allowed caffeine dose in a single serving (200mg caffeine). In comparison, an average cup of brewed coffee has about 90-150mg caffeine.

Other stimulants included in energy drinks, like guarana – a plant which releases its high caffeine content more slowly than coffee – and taurine, which can amplify the effects of caffeine, make these riskier, Dr Bing continued.

The combination can “increase your risk of dangerous heart rhythms”, increasing your risk of clots, which may travel to your brain to cause a stroke.

One paper found that excessive energy drink consumption could significantly raise stroke risk after a stroke victim with very high blood pressure saw his levels return to normal after giving up his eight-can-a-day habit.

Speaking to HuffPost UK previously, Dr Arun Narayanan, a clinical electrophysiologist and an assistant professor of medicine, said: “In general, I would recommend limiting energy drinks to no more than one standard-sized can per day, and for many individuals, avoiding them altogether may be the safer choice.”

The doctor said that there’s a term linked to this risk: a “heavy lift stroke”.

One paper found that stroke risk was 2.6 times higher an hour after lifting a weight weighing about 23 kilos or more.

And doing so while holding your breath means you’re more likely to accidentally perform a Valsalva manoeuvre, Dr Bing continued. This increases the pressure in your chest and can affect your heart rate and blood pressure, too.

In fact, the neurologist said, it can spike systolic blood pressure to over 400, which is “a massive surge of force on the blood vessels in the brain”. This increased stress raises your risk of stroke.

He added that controlling your breathing while lifting and doing lighter weights for more reps can help you achieve your strength goals without raising your blood pressure quite so much.

Noting that. in general, yoga is great for our health, Dr Bing said that some positions may be dangerous in rare cases.

Those which make us flex or extend our neck too far can cause tears in our vessel walls (dissection), which can sometime lead to stroke.

These dissections have previously been noted in a pilot who had to crane his neck into an awkward position to rescue his dropped wedding ring, and a retiree who squeezed his neck into a small space while tinkering with his sink.

And a 2022 paper described a man who’d experienced torn arteries after a yoga class, adding that “yoga is a well-described cause of cervical [neck] arterial dissection, with stroke or TIA [transient ischemic attack, or “mini-stroke”] being the common chief complaint”.

So, Dr Bing said, “avoiding extreme [neck] strain is very important in yoga”.