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The good news about strokes is we're getting them later in life. The bad news is, we're still getting them. There's both good and sobering news about our chances of having a stroke, according to a 50-year study of nearly 10,000 people in the town of Framingham Massachusetts. The good news was that the chances of having a first episode of stroke at any given age declined over that time. What also declined were the chances of dying of a stroke over a 10 year period. Three things didn't change much though. The first was the severity of the stroke if you actually had one. The second thing that didn't budge was the risk in women of dying in the month following a stroke. And the 3rd measure that didn't move significantly was the lifetime risk - the total chance of having a stroke throughout life. So people were still having strokes which were as bad as ever but later in life at a rate of around one in five or six people - presumably in sync with increases in life expectancy. So it's likely that the causes of the shift in stroke incidence to older ages are similar to the causes of longer lives - namely we're better at controlling risk factors like smoking, cholesterol and blood pressure. In Australia, stroke incidence according to age has also declined so it's likely the findings would be comparable here. It means there's no cause for complacency. Stroke ain't beat yet.
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