In the US, nearly 800,000 people have a stroke each year, 600,000 of which are first-time strokes. But a new study suggests that the past 2 decades have seen a decline in the number of Americans who experience a stroke, and those who do have a lower chance of dying from it.

The research was led by a team from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD, and is published in JAMA.

Overall, the findings revealed a 24% drop in first-time strokes in both of the last 2 decades and a 20% drop per decade in deaths following a stroke.

Share on Pinterest Though still the number 4 cause of death in the US, stroke rates have declined over the past 20 years.

“We can congratulate ourselves that we are doing well,” says Dr. Josef Coresh, professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins, “but stroke is still the No. 4 cause of death in the US.”

Despite the promising findings, he worries that with the growing obesity epidemic and the associated hypertension and diabetes, many Americans will see an increased stroke risk.

He adds that their research “reminds us that there are many forces threatening to push stroke rates back up and if we don’t address them head-on, our gains may be lost.”

To conduct their study, the team used data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, which is a prospective study involving 15,792 participants in the US, who were between the ages of 45-64 at the start of the study in the 1980s.

In total, the researchers followed 14,357 stroke-free people in 1987 and assessed all stroke hospitalizations and deaths between that year and 2011.