Adult smokers with limited education face a higher risk of stroke than smokers with a higher education, according to a recent study.

In a multicenter Danish study, researchers defined lower education as grade school or lower secondary school (maximum of 10 years) education. The combination of smoking and high blood pressure increased stroke risk the most.

"We found it is worse being a current smoker with lower education than a current smoker with a higher education," said Helene Nordahl, study lead author and researcher at the Department of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. "Targeted interventions aimed at reducing smoking and high blood pressure in lower socioeconomic groups would yield a greater reduction in stroke than targeting the same behaviors in higher socioeconomic groups."

For the study, researchers divided more than 68,600 adults between the ages of 30 and 70 years old into low, medium and high education levels and assessed smoking and high blood pressure levels.

The team found that 16 percent of men and 11 percent of women were at high-risk of stroke due to low education level, smoking and high blood pressure, and that the risk of stroke increased with age. They also found that Smokers with low education had a greater risk of stroke than smokers with high education regardless of their blood pressure.

"Universal interventions such as legislation or taxation could also have a strong effect on stroke in the most disadvantaged," Nordahl said. "We need to challenge disparities in unhealthy behaviors, particularly smoking."

Researchers weren't able to consider differences associated with ethnicity because 98 percent of the participants were Danes.

"The distribution of stroke risk factors may vary across various contexts and study populations," Nordahl said. "However, since the most disadvantaged groups are often exposed to a wide number of stroke risk factors, it seems plausible that these people are at higher risk of stroke not only in Denmark, but also in other industrialized countries."

The findings were recently published in the American Heart Association's journal Stroke.