An alarming research, led by an Indian-origin scientist has found that one in three people, between the age group of 30-69 years, living in India’s north-eastern states, suffered premature deaths due to haemorrhagic stroke in 2015.
The research finding also revealed that there it was about three times higher than the national average.
Hypertension is the primary risk factor for haemorrhagic stroke and consumption of excessive salt could be one of the reasons.
According to the study, high blood pressure, inadequate stroke care and novel risk factors such as endemic infections might have played a role in increased mortality rates in these regions, representing a sixth of the country’s population.
The study, published in The Lancet Global Health, showed that cardiovascular diseases, comprising mostly ischaemic heart disease and stroke, accounted for more than 2.1 million deaths in India in 2015 at all ages, or more than a quarter of all deaths.
“The finding that cardiac disease rose nationally in India and that stroke rose in some states was surprising,” said Prabhat Jha, Professor at the University of Toronto, in Canada.
For the research, the team examined 472,113 deaths of individuals older than 15 years from 2001 to 2013, including 111,977 deaths due to cardiovascular disease – 68,904 adult men (61.5 per cent) and 43,073 women (38.5 per cent).
High-burden states for male stroke deaths were Assam, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, and Meghalaya apart from West Bengal and Chhattisgarh.
The high-burden states for female stroke deaths were Assam, along with other north-eastern states and West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh.