Stroke Essay

A stroke or cerebrovascular accident “effects 800,000 people a year”, the fourth leading cause of morality.1 A stroke is caused by a blockage or a hemorrhage interrupting the blood flow to the brain and depriving the brain of oxygen.2 This lack of blood flow to the brain results in the affected areas inability to properly function, for example, some may have difficulty speaking, understanding, writing or reading language, while others may have paralysis on one side of their body.3 More importantly, a stroke may cause permanent brain damage and death. There are treatable risk factors include smoking, drinking, drugs, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes.1 Other risk factors are previous stroke, being 55 or older, African-Americans, and although, males have a higher risk of having stroke, females are more likely to die of strokes.1

Using a descriptive analysis on the stroke mortality data sets from the Center of Disease Control Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (CDC Wonder), data was gathered on race, age, sex, geographic distribution, and incidence in a ten-year period. The stroke morality data was across a ten-year period, 2000-2010. The data examined only deaths categorized as I63.9, Cerebral Infraction, Unspecific and underlying cause of death, which would only identify one disease leading to death. Individuals from under 1 year old and greater were included in the analysis as well as not stated or unknown age.

The analysis used the standard-age adjusted rates provided by CDC wonder. Also, the analysis depicts the geographic distributions of stroke mortality across the United States. During 2000-2010, there were 65,933 deaths due to cerebral infraction of those 328 occurred in Maine.4 ...

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...f these reasons affect the analytic results. Still, the figures provided through this analysis poses further need to look at comparable characteristics, health risk, and patient care in regards to precepts to a stroke.

In conclusion, accurate data collection is needed to accurately portray morality rates. After inputting my subset group to perform the analysis, I questioned my originally output, as it did not mirror the data stated by the National Stroke Association. The National Stroke Association stated, stroke mortality is 133,000 individual every year; 5 whereas, my stroke mortality was 65,933 individual every year4. My theory is the National Stroke Association utilizes a boarder classification in determining their morality rate. This difference solidified the importance of data collection and interpretation of that data is extremely important in epidemiology