UK Stroke Forum 2025 | A population-based study on trends and inequalities in stroke incidence

We analyzed data from three decades that was collected prospectively and that has been collected, used a population-based method, which is very rare, but it’s a gold standard in stroke incidence studies. And with this, we found that during the first two decades of analysis, the stroke incidence was declining, yet was declining mostly in the white populations and less in the Black African and the Black Caribbean populations. And in the last five years, stroke incidence as a total is rising. And this rise is mainly driven by a rise in incidence in Black African and Black Caribbean populations. This is true for all the subtypes of stroke and for all strokes, so it’s mostly seen in ischemic and intracerebral hemorrhage, because for subarachnoid hemorrhage, as it is a rarer disease, then our estimates are not as powerful as for ischemic and intracerebral hemorrhage. However, when we analyze these longitudinally, we found that during the three decades, constantly, all the decades, the Black African and Black Caribbean populations have higher strokes, but this gap is actually widening in the last five years, and further, we wanted to see within each ethnicity what the role of socioeconomic status was, and we found that, within each ethnicity, the people living in the most deprived areas were having even higher incidence, with the highest stroke incidence seen in the Black African populations living in the most deprived areas. So this really focuses and this really creates a target population where we need to be addressing the cardiovascular risk factors.

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