Higher than average for death risk rate caused heart failure among people who live in ‘stroke belt’ region in US

The national average of death related to heart failure in the U.S. is about 18 per 100,000 people.

However, for those who live in ‘stroke belt’ region such as Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississipi, and Oklahoma, the death rate associated with heart failure showed higher (69%) than national rate for heart failure-related death.

This finding just reported in the American Journal of Cardiology on January 19, 2011 by researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Although heart failure and stroke are two very distinct conditions, but they were not sure what kind of geographical pattern they would find going into this study, except zeroing that region as the heart failure belt.

Therefore, the team now looking at non-traditional risk factors for stroke, such as education and income, environmental exposure and specific diet habits, because for traditional risk factors likes high blood pressure, diabetes, and African-American race seem to explain only half of the excess risk of stroke death in that region.

So far, according to the authors of the study, the higher death rate could either mean that people in the southeast are more likely to develop heart failure than other Americans are, or that when they do they are more likely to die from it. Or it could be both.
Also, it could be that higher rates of atherosclerosis, hypertension, and diabetes explain the heart failure belt, or the people in the southeast are more likely to progress to severe heart failure, possibly related to differences in the quality of their healthcare.

The authors concluded that more research is needed to weed out the reasons for their findings.