Ethnic differences in life expectancy and cognitively healthy and unhealthy life years after stroke - beginning in the 1960S and continuing through the early part of the twenty first century, there…

Ethnic differences in life expectancy and cognitively healthy and unhealthy life years after stroke - beginning in the 1960S and continuing through the early part of the twenty first century, there has been a marked decline in stroke mortality rates in the US. This decline in combination with the aging of the US population will result in a large increase in the number of individuals living with stroke, estimated to reach 10 million by 2030. Stroke survivors experience a range of impacts from stroke including physical and cognitive deficits and reduced quality of life, and because stroke mortality has declined, many stroke survivors could live for years to decades with these stroke-related deficits. Stroke disproportionately impacts minorities, including mexican americans, who represent the largest subgroup of hispanic americans, the most numerous minority group in the US. Mexican americans have strokes at younger ages and experience worse physical and cognitive limitations at 90 days following stroke compared with their non-hispanic white counterparts but little is known about the impacts of these disparities on longer-term outcomes, such as life expectancy after stroke and the number of years lived in cognitively and functionally healthy and unhealthy states. Further, post-stroke physical and cognitive limitations frequently CO-occur. While data shows that their CO-occurrence in the general population increases risk of dementia, dependency, and death, little empirical work has considered the inter- relationships of physical and cognitive limitations following stroke. Such data would speak to the resources needed to support the growing number of stroke survivors, many of whom will be cognitively and physically impaired, and could inform policies to improve the health of the growing diverse aging US population in the future. The brain attack surveillance in corpus christi (basic) project is a long-running BI-ethnic population- based stroke study initiated in 2000 with continuous mortality follow-up of stroke survivors and post-stroke cognitive and physical assessments since 2009. The mexican american population in basic is predominantly non-immigrant, second and third generation US born individuals and thus, reflects the growing number of latinx individuals aging in place in the US. Using the unique data collected in basic, the overarching goal of this project is to measure levels of and disparities in life expectancy and cognitively and functionally healthy and unhealthy life years lived after stroke in mexican americans and non-hispanic whites, as well as trends in these outcomes.