US strokes, stroke deaths decreased over past decades

Posted: Published on July 17th, 2014

This post was added by Dr Simmons

The number of Americans having strokes and the number dying following strokes decreased over the past 20 years, according to a new study.

The declines in strokes and improvements in survival were similar between blacks, whites, men and women, according to the researchers.

Stroke is still the fourth leading cause of death and the leading cause of disability in the U.S. but were doing better, said Dr. Josef Coresh, the studys senior author from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

More than 795,000 people in the U.S. have a stroke each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and about 130,000 die as a result.

The vast majority of strokes are ischemic strokes, which occur when blood flow to the brain is blocked. About 10 percent of strokes, known as hemorrhagic stokes, are caused by leaking blood vessels.

Coresh and his colleagues write in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, that some studies have reported a decline in stroke rates.

Whether that decline has been consistent among people of all races and among both men and women is still up for debate, however.

For example, some studies from the U.S. and UK found that strokes decreased among whites but not blacks, who are already known to be at greater risk of stroke than whites.

To learn more, the researchers analyzed data from a long-term study of 15,792 people in four areas of the U.S. The participants were between 45 and 64 years old when they entered the study between 1987 and 1989.

The authors restricted the current analysis to 14,357 people who had not had a stroke when they entered the study. They found 1,051 participants had a stroke by 2011 and 58 percent of those people died during the study period.

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US strokes, stroke deaths decreased over past decades

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