A new study shows that stroke is more than twice as prevalent in middle-aged women as in men of the same age. 

Presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2007, investigators at University of California, Los Angeles Stroke Center found that women between the ages of 45 and 54 had 2.5 times the risk of having experienced a stroke compared with their male counterparts. "This was a surprising finding. The conventional wisdom is that middle-aged women have the same risk or a lower risk for stroke than men, but this turned out not to be the case," the study's principal investigator, Dr. Amytis Towfighi, told Diabetes in Control.