Research Paper|Volume 10, Issue 11|pp 3438—3449

Trends in stroke incidence among elderly low-income residents of rural China: a population-based study from 1992 to 2016

Hongyan Lu^1,², Zaiyu Guo³, Jie Liu^1,^2,⁴, Heliang Zhang³, Wei Zhao³, Yanan Wu^1,^2,⁴, Jingxian Ni^1,^2,⁴, Wei Liu¹, Jun Tu^1,^2,⁴, Jinghua Wang^1,^2,⁴, Xianjia Ning^1,^2,⁴, Jianning Zhang^2,⁵

¹Department of Neurology, Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, Tianjin, 300052, China
²Tianjin Neurological Institute, Key Laboratory of Post-Neuroinjury Neuro-repair and Regeneration in Central Nervous System, Ministry of Education and Tianjin City, Tianjin, 300052, China
³Department of Neurology, Tianjin TEDA Hospital, Tianjin, 300457, China
⁴Laboratory of Epidemiology, Tianjin Neurological Institute, Tianjin, 300052, China
⁵Department of Neurosurgery, Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, Tianjin, 300052, China

* * Equal contribution

Received: July 4, 2018Accepted: November 15, 2018Published: November 28, 2018

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101657

Copyright: © 2018 Lu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

In China, >70% of stroke deaths occur in people aged ≥65 years. However, trends in the stroke incidence among elderly people are unclear. We aimed to determine trends in the stroke incidence among elderly people in rural China. This was a population-based surveillance study conducted in Tianjin, China. Stroke events and all deaths were registered annually. Trends and annual proportion of change in incidence of first-ever stroke were evaluated from 1992 to 2016. The age-standardized incidence of first-ever stroke increased annually by 3.7% overall in elderly people (2.7% for men; 5.0% for women; all P<0.05). However, from 2008 to 2016, there was no significant change in the trends of stroke incidence among elderly people, across gender and subtypes. The proportion of elderly patients with first-ever stroke decreased by 1.1% annually. In contrast to young patients, annual changes in the incidence of stroke tended to be slight in elderly patients (3.7% vs. 9.5%) with greater increase in female patients than those in male patients (2.7% vs. 10.3% for men; 5.0% vs. 8.9% for women). Thus, the control of risk factors for stroke among elderly people is crucial, especially among older women, to reduce the burden of stroke in China.