Circadian Variation of Stroke Onset and Other Clinical Characteristics: A Single-Center Study

Abstract

Cardiovascular events tend to occur mostly in the morning. Stroke is also known to occur most frequently in the morning. Although previous studies speculated that circadian rhythm of blood pressure could affect the occurrence of stroke, a recent study showed that there is no significant circadian variation of blood pressure in stroke patients. Furthermore, circadian variation of these clinical characteristics in stroke patients might affect prognosis after using tissue plasminogen activator. Therefore, the knowledge of circadian variation of various clinical characteristics might help in understanding these differences in prognosis among stroke patients. However, circadian variability in stroke occurrence has not been properly evaluated in Korean stroke patients and there is no systematic studies regarding the circadian variation of clinical characteristics in stroke patients. Therefore, we tried to delineate whether the time of symptom onset in stroke patients follows circadian rhythm using Cosinor analysis and to identify clinical characteristics which show similar circadian distribution as that of symptom onset time in stroke patients.