CONSTITUTION (PRAKRITI) AS DEFINED BY TRADITIONAL INDIAN MEDICINE IS A RISK FACTOR FOR STROKE

Ayurveda (traditional Indian medicine) describes the prakriti (constitution) of an individual in terms of three major phenotypic patterns, called vata, pitta and kapha. Prakriti has been found to correlate with genomic variations, enzymatic polymorphisms, and severity of disease manifestation in recent studies. It is also believed to influence disease susceptibility. We performed a Case-control study to investigate whether prakriti is associated with risk for stroke. Adult subjects diagnosed with an ischaemic, haemorrhagic or venous stroke (n=166) and their caregivers/bystanders (n=159) in the hospital without a history of stroke, were enrolled for the study. A 62-item yes/no questionnaire previously developed for prakriti analysis, was administered to the cases and controls.
Stroke patients had significantly lower kapha scores compared to controls (figure). Pitta and vata scores showed no significant difference. Next, we performed regression analyses to determine if kapha scores added any information to a model comprising known risk factors for stroke. We found that a low kapha score was an independent predictor of stroke risk, in addition to known vascular risk factors (table). Prakriti appears to be associated with risk for stroke, and merits further epidemiological exploration.
