The stroke death rate has increased worldwide over the last two decades, remaining the second leading cause of death globally as of 2019 and the fifth in the U.S.

While the number of Americans over 75 having strokes has decreased, they have become more prevalent among adults under 50; in the U.S., someone has a stroke every 40 seconds. The incidence of stroke and stroke-related death does not impact all Americans equally, however.

Stacker collected information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Interactive Atlas of Heart Disease and Stroke to find the states with the highest prevalence of stroke deaths. The data is an age-standardized death rate per 100,000 residents between 2018 and 2020 for all genders, races/ethnicities, and ages. The CDC collects information on stroke deaths from their mortality data, looking at a group of International Classification of Diseases codes related to stroke. Age-standardized means different age groups are weighted differently to account for the difference in occurrences between age groups. This allows states with different age distributions to be compared equally to one another.

Continue reading at AL.com.