Knowledge about treatment for reducing the risk of having a new stroke/TIA
Patients were asked to list their drugs and to mark those that they thought were intended to prevent recurrent stroke/TIA events. 605 of the 1200 patients (50Æ4%) reported taking drugs, 565 (47Æ1%) reported not taking any drugs and 30 (2Æ5%) did not answer the question. Knowledge of preventive treatment was very poor, and only 155 (25Æ6%) of those taking preventive drugs considered them as preventive. Anticoagulants and platelet aggregation inhibitors are important drugs for stroke/TIA prevention, but only about 20% of those who reported taking marked them as intended for prevention. About a third of patients who reported taking antihypertensive and very few of those taking antilipemic (21Æ5%) and hypoglycaemic agents (18Æ8%) marked them as intended for prevention (Table 4).