Topic
Stroke
Stroke (cerebrovascular disease) death rates fell dramatically across the later 20th century. Recent final years remain far below early-1900s levels.
Stroke coding and clinical definitions have changed across ICD revisions. Treat long historical comparisons as directional, and lean on the post-1999 ICD-10 segment for modern year-to-year reading.
Stroke: age-adjusted death rate
Deaths per 100,000 U.S. standard population · Age-adjusted (2000 U.S. standard for modern years)
Breaks to watch: expanding Death Registration Area until 1933; multiple ICD revisions (including ICD-10 in 1999); source segment change after 2018 (Data Briefs). This is not one seamless identically defined series. Latest final year on this page’s series: 2024.
Data table & download
Source: NCHS major-cause historical file (1900–2018); 2019–2024 from NCHS Data Briefs 427, 456, 521, 548
How to read this chart
- Do not read the long line as one uninterrupted, identically defined series. NCHS itself warns that ICD revisions may create discontinuities in cause-of-death trends.
- Geography: for 1900–1932, vital statistics cover the expanding Death Registration Area (not all U.S. states). Beginning 1933, tables are for the United States as a whole (HIST293 / NCHS historical notes).
- ICD revisions (including but not limited to transitions into ICD-7/8/9 and the 1999 ICD-10 transition) can jump rates for coding reasons. A marker is shown at 1933 (national registration) and 1999 (ICD-10). Earlier revision years are called out in the methods text rather than falsely smoothed.
- Age standard: portal metadata states rates after 1998 use the 2000 U.S. standard population; pre-1999 points come from NCHS historical data that HIST293 describes as recalculated to the 2000 standard for selected-cause tables. Still treat century-scale moves as directional NCHS trend indexes.
- Source segments: 1900–2018 from NCHS dataset 6rkc-nb2q; 2019–2024 appended from NCHS Mortality Data Briefs (427/456/521/548) using ICD-10 leading-cause groups and deaths per 100,000 U.S. standard population. Table segment labels keep those sources distinct.
- Cause titles in the historical file are short labels (Heart Disease, Cancer, Stroke, Accidents, Influenza and Pneumonia). Recent brief tables use ICD-10 rankable groups (e.g., Diseases of heart; Malignant neoplasms; Accidents V01–X59, Y85–Y86).
- Influenza and pneumonia recent rates appear only for years published in the extracted leading-cause tables used here (2019–2020). Later years are gaps, not zeros.
- These are population death rates (underlying cause), not disease progression in individual patients, and not incidence or prevalence.