In 2018, it was estimated that around 2.8 percent of adults in the U.S. had had a stroke at some point in their lives. Stroke is slightly more common among men than women, and one’s chances of experiencing a stroke increases with age. Whereas only 0.6 percent of those aged 18 to 44 years had suffered a stroke, almost 12 percent of those aged 75 years and older had experienced such an event. Furthermore, those aged 65 years and older accounted for around 62 percent of all inpatient stroke cases in 2017.
Although cerebrovascular disease remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States, death rates from such conditions have decreased significantly for both men and women since the 1950s. Stroke death rates have also decreased for various ethnicities in the U.S. in the past decade. However, the death rate from stroke among African Americans remains much higher than among other ethnicities. Similarly, there are variations in stroke death rates among U.S. states, with the states with the highest death rates found in the South, giving rise to this region being called the stroke belt. In the period 2015 to 2017, Mississippi had the highest death rate from stroke of any U.S. state, followed by Alabama and Louisiana.
