Stroke Decline: Implications and Prospects

Good news is worth telling and retelling. Age-adjusted cardiovascular mortality rates have declined almost 32 per cent over the last 30 years. In the last 10 years, however, the decrease has accelerated precipitously, accounting for over two thirds of the total 30-year reduction, and is seen in both sexes, in whites and nonwhites and in every age-decade band from the second to beyond the eighth. Not only have death rates declined, but despite an aging and ever increasing population, the total number of cardiovascular deaths fell below one million in 1975 for the first time in almost a decade and . . .