Americans are more likely to survive strokes today compared to the past, but Blacks are more likely than whites to die within five years after a particular stroke event, according to a new report based on data from Ohio residents.
Data was derived from a sample of people living in five counties around Cincinnati, Ohio. The authors say the area represents the general population of America. Researchers say that better treatments and symptoms of stroke care are leading to improvements in survival. Still, Black American stroke survivors were 20% more likely to die within five years after an ischemic stroke than white individuals, the data showed.
The team isn’t sure exactly why the racial disparity exists, but think that economic, social and environmental factors probably play a role in the disparity.
“We saw that there clearly has been an improvement in five-year mortality [death] after stroke, and it probably is at least partially driven by the stroke systems of care that have been set up here in Cincinnati,” David Robinson, MD, a co-author of the study published on Monday in Neurology, said in a HealthDay article.
The team tracked stroke death and survival rates since 1993 to draw the conclusions. Of 8,428 people who had an ischemic stroke (the most common type, which is caused by clots), the death rate of survivors in the five years after their stroke decreased from 53% in 1993-94 to 48.3% in 2015, the data showed.
A total of 1,501 people in the study with another type of stroke called intracerebral hemorrhage didn’t have an improvement in five-year survival.“For the first time, we saw that there clearly has been an improvement in five-year mortality after stroke, and it probably is at least partially driven by the stroke systems of care that have been set up here in Cincinnati,” Robinson said in a statement. “The data suggests that we have specific interventions in the care of stroke that are disproportionately improving mortality for that particular group of people.”
