Patients with a first ischemic stroke face high risks of both cardiac mortality and nonfatal recurrent stroke, emphasizing the need for comprehensive secondary prevention.
Cardiac mortality is nearly twice as high as mortality owing to recurrent stroke, but long-term risk of all stroke, fatal or nonfatal, is approximately twice the risk of all cardiac events. The high risk of nonfatal recurrent stroke reinforces the importance of therapies aimed at preventing stroke recurrence in addition to preventing cardiac events.
Dhamoon et al. (Mon,) studied this question.