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America’s Stroke Belt partially fueled by
Fried Fish
Newswise,
December 27, 2010 — Eating a Southern
staple, fried fish, could be one reason
people in Alabama and across the “stroke
belt” states are more likely than other
Americans to die of a stroke, according to a
study published in the December 22, 2010,
online issue of Neurology,
the medical journal of the American Academy
of Neurology (AAN).
In the stroke belt states – Alabama,
Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi,
North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee
– the risk of dying from stroke is higher
than in other parts of the country. In
Alabama, the stroke death rate is 125 per
every 100,000 people, against a national
average of just 98 per 100,000.
The study was
part of the long-running REGARDS (Reasons
for Geographic And Racial Differences in
Stroke) trial, led by George Howard, Dr. PH,
at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
REGARDS enrolled 21,675 people over the age
of 45 between January 2003 and October 2007,
and continues to follow them for health
events.
Studies have
shown that the omega-3 fatty acids in fish,
especially fatty fish, may reduce the risk
of stroke, but other research has shown that
frying fish leads to the loss of the natural
fatty acids, the AAN said in a press
release.
The American
Heart Association recommends that people eat
fish at least twice a week, with an emphasis
on fatty fish. In the entire study, fewer
than 1 in 4 participants consumed two or
more servings of non-fried fish per week;
people in the stroke buckle were 17 percent
less likely to meet the recommendations than
those in the rest of the country, the AAN
said.
Moreover, the
study showed that people in the stroke belt
were 30 percent more likely to eat two or
more servings of fried fish than those in
the rest of the country.
“These
differences in fish consumption may be one
of the potential reasons for the racial and
geographic differences in stroke incidence
and mortality,” Fadi Nahab, M.D., of Emory
University, author of the current paper,
said in an AAN press release.
“Our study
showed that stroke belt residents,
especially African-Americans, eat more fried
fish than Caucasians and people living in
the rest of the country,” said Howard,
professor and chair of the Department of
Biostatistics in the School of Public Health
at UAB.
The study
found that blacks were more than three and a
half times more likely to eat fried fish per
week than whites, with an overall average of
about one serving per week of fried fish for
blacks compared to half of a serving for
whites.
“One of the next steps in this research will
be to determine if people who eat higher
amounts of non-fried fish have less risk of
stroke than people who don’t eat a lot of
fish or eat more fried fish,” says Suzanne
Judd, Ph.D., assistant professor of
biostatistics at UAB and a study co-author.
The study was
supported by the National Institute of
Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the
National Institutes of Health, and the
Department of Health and Human Services.
Funding was provided by General Mills for
coding of the food frequency questionnaire.
Other
co-authors were Anh Le, MS, Department of
Biostatistics and Virginia Howard, Ph.D.,
Department of Epidemiology, UAB School of
Public Health.
About the
School of Public Health at the University of
Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)
More than 60
faculty members and 100 part-time and
volunteer faculty lead the UAB School of
Public Health. It is comprised of in
Departments of Biostatistics, Environmental
Health Sciences, Epidemiology, Health
Behavior and Health Care Organization and
Policy. Find more information atwww.soph.uab.edu.
