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Stroke Kills More Americans Than
Europeans --Different Health Risks and
Barriers to Healthcare Are to Blame
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By Susan M. Callahan, Associate Editor and Featured Columnist
February 22, 2008
The American Stroke Association today announced that a
comprehensive study of Americans and Europeans has shown that
Americans face significantly higher risk of death from stroke than
Europeans. Different health risk factors and barriers to health care
explain the difference.
The key health risk factors which Americans relates to our diets.
Europeans, especially those in southern Europe, eat healthier diets.
"Southern Mediterranean countries
have a diet rich in vegetables,
fruits and fish and lower in fats,
which partly explains why
heart disease is so much lower
in these populations than in
northern Europe and the United States,”
the study's author, Dr. Avenido said.
The study's results are consistent with
studies which have linked inflammation
inside the body to increased risk of
stroke and heart disease.
Read the Full Press Release Below
"Stroke News
02/12/2008
Stroke more prevalent in United
States than in Europe
Abstract 120
NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 22 – American
adults have a higher prevalence of
stroke than their European counterparts,
due in part to a higher rate of stroke risk
factors among Americans and barriers
to care in the United States, according
to a study presented at the American
Stroke Association’s International
Stroke Conference 2008.
Compared to European men, U.S. men had 61 percent higher odds of
having a stroke and U.S. women had almost twice the odds of stroke
as European women.
“Most of this gap is among relatively poor Americans who were, in our
data, much more likely to have a stroke than poor Europeans, whereas
the gap in stroke prevalence is less marked between rich Americans
and rich Europeans,” said Mauricio Avendano, Ph.D., author of the
study.
The study is based on 2004 data from the U.S. Health and Retirement
Survey (HRS); the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe
(SHARE); and the English Longitudinal study of Aging (ELSA). These
surveys include biennial interviews among people age 50 years and
older.
“The strength of these surveys is that the questionnaires were
explicitly designed to be fully comparable across all countries, and the
samples were drawn to be representative of the entire population in
each country,” said Avendano, a research fellow in public health at the
Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
“The limitation is that we’re dealing with self-reports of a doctor’s
diagnosis of stroke, not the diagnostic data itself.”
Researchers studied data on 13,667 people in the United States and
30,120 individuals in 11 European countries. The analysis included
stroke occurrence, socioeconomic status, and major risk factors for
stroke including obesity, diabetes, smoking, physical activity and
alcohol consumption, which can differ largely across countries.
Overall, women were about one-quarter less likely to have a stroke,
on average, than men.
“Many risk factors for stroke, including blood pressure and smoking,
have generally increased among women but remained stable among
men,” Avendano said. “This may explain why the gap in stroke
prevalence between men and women is less marked than before. In
fact, in some age groups and populations such as France, women may
have higher prevalence of stroke than men.”
The age-adjusted prevalence rate of stroke varied considerably across
countries. It was highest in the United States and lowest in the
southern Mediterranean European countries of Spain, Italy and
Greece, as well as Switzerland.
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