People in a large area of the American South have long been known to have more strokes and to be more likely to die from them than people living elsewhere in the country.
Now, a large national study suggests the so-called stroke belt may have another troubling health distinction. Researchers have found that Southerners there also are more likely to experience a decline in cognitive ability over several years — specifically, problems with memory and orientation.
The differences to date in the continuing study are not large: Of nearly 24,000 participants, 1,090 in eight stroke-belt states showed signs of cognitive decline after four years, compared with 847 people in 40 other states.
But the geographic difference persisted even after the researchers adjusted for factors — like age, sex, race and education — that might influence the result. The most recent data from the study were published in Annals of Neurology.
None of the people with cognitive decline in the study had had detectable strokes. But some experts believe their memory problems and other mental issues could be related to the same underlying risk factors, including lifestyle patterns that contribute to hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes and obesity.
Is it the fried food beloved by Southerners? Limited access to doctors? Too little exercise? Researchers are investigating those and other possible causes. Some experts also suggest that the participants could have had small, undetectable strokes that subtly affected brain function.
Full write-up with methods and results here.
AdamK
Stupid is contagious.
Southern Beale
What I always come back to is the basic fact that IT’S SO FUCKING HOT HERE. That just explains everything, including why I’m sitting on my ass on the sofa surfing the ‘net with my laptop on a beautiful summer day. It’s beautiful from the inside out. Outside, IT’S SO FUCKING HOT.
I really hate the climate here. HATE IT.
eemom
this topic appears to lend itself to innumerable varieties of unkind, mean spirited snark most unbefitting of a liberal blog and respect for our fellow citizens on the birthday of our nation.
Tonal Crow
Republicans in power => loose regulation of environmental toxins => increased retardation => more Republicans in power.
Any questions?
Derf
…and in other news, the sun will set in the west.
Stupid people in red states dying because of poor lifestyle habits is news?
I say we all give them a hand. Tell them to eat more freeDUMB fries because eating vegetables is a liberal plot!
General Stuck
Yes. That and pig ignorance
MikeJ
Our nation that those states committed treason against.
JD Rhoades
Well, looks like we’re in for another barrage of “Fuck the South” comments.
I’ll be back when the hate-fest has died down.
You know, being a liberal around here is fucking hard enough without that bullshit.
4jkb4ia
@4: No, because the Stroke Belt was first identified in 1965, as shown in the link.
In general : Stupidity isn’t cognitive impairment. They measured very simple memory problems which could indicate Alzheimer’s.
mb
primary cause: excessive love of jesus
BO_Bill
We have been through this before. This region has many common traits which include high rates of obesity and diabetes, and now we are taught, strokes. The left attempts to associate these symptoms with conservative southern lifestyles. But this is completely incorrect.
If you look at county-by-county data, you learn that it is not really a region, but a crescent. Now, this crescent follows an ancient seabed. On this seabed, millions of years ago, dead stuff washed up and fertilized the soil. This soil, a few hundred years ago, was determined to grow great crops of cotton. So this is where slave labor was employed, and succeeding generations of the former slave labor force continue to live.
So this crescent should not be associated with conservative southern values, but instead with former slave populations which have challenges with self-discipline, manifesting itself with bad diets and associated health problems.
TooManyJens
Surely increasing the opportunity for people in the region to get access to decent health care and education would help. Unfortunately, the Right has managed to convince most citizens of the region that the people who want them to have those things are un-American elitists, and the people who don’t want them to have those things are “just folks” like them.
TooManyJens
Look, the racist is still here convincing himself and others that he’s clever. Because dumbshits can’t spew racist lies. Oh, wait …
nancydarling
@11 Read the story dumbass—researchers adjusted for factors such as race. You are crossing my line with “challenges to self-discipline” comments.
arguingwithsignposts
That’s just crazy talk. Why, BOB just explained that it all has to do with some pre-cambrian seabed, or some shit like that.
And, as a reformed southerner, you can have my fried chicken and mashed potatoes when you pry them from my cold, grease-encrusted hands.
Downpuppy
It’s kind of a fun study to be in. They call you up every 6 months with a bunch of odd questions, then ask if you remember one of the early ones.
Wearing the exercise belt gets a little uncomfortable towards the end of the week.
BO_Bill
Nancy, sweetheart, you read the study:
“Historically, there has been a greater concentration of AA adults living in the Stroke Belt than in the remaining United States, and living in the Stroke Belt and being AA both increase risk for stroke mortality. The excess stroke mortality borne by AAs appears to be due to higher stroke incidence rates among AAs, which is particularly apparent at younger ages.”
nancydarling
What about this is so hard to understand?
lojasmo
Primary cause: Federal moneez. Let’s cut them off.
arguingwithsignposts
@BOB: hmmmm. Wonder why there has historically been more AAs living in the stroke belt? Wonder if historical efforts to keep said AAs poor and uneducated might be a factor? Idiot.
dww44
As a lifelong Southerner and one whose 93 year old Mom is in the last stages of dementia in a nursing home, I am interested in data that might help me avoid the same fate, given that Mom was one of 8 siblings, with 3 dying of the same disease, and whose Mom and maternal Grandmother both died of the dementia, I’d love to be able to avoid the long drawn out battle with dementia. It’s also fair to say that all of her siblings lived long and fruitful lives, including the still living 97 year old sister.
However, it should be pointed out that my Mom worked hard (physically), was never fat, and her siblings weren’t either. I think the linkage is indeed to “mini” or barely detectable pin strokes, perhaps contributed to by diet. Yes, fried foods were favorites, but their diets were also big on the veggies.
Mom’s memory issues manifested around age 85. Indeed, I think the national data indicates that one out of every 2 persons past the age of 85 has some form of dementia. I would also point out to “Bo Bill” that the great majority of residents in Mom’s public nursing home are white, the overwhelming number of them with dementia. There are a number of black residents but they seem to be less likely to manifest obvious dementia symptoms.
Perhaps it is the heat. I like what Bailey White had to say about our summer weather on NPR ‘s All Things Considered the other day. Sorry, I tried to post the link, but must not know how to do that properly.
Riggsveda
As a lover of southern food and someone who spent time in New Orleans, I have to vote for the food. God, I love it, but from a health perspective, most of it’s pure poison.
I’ll have the roast beef po’ boy with debris and a side of hush puppies, please. Then I believe I’ll have the beignet and cafe au lait, and a drive-through daiquiri, thanks.
Tonal Crow
@BO_Bill:
Hey racist, somehow you forgot to the sentence immediately preceding your quote:
Don’t you have a “Heartland Institute” conference to go to? I hear they have excellent sessions with titles like “Persuade with Selective Quoting” and “Cherrypicking for Morans”.
Egypt Steve
@ BO_Bill. High demographic concentrations of formerly enslaved populations, *and* prevalence of conservative white values, are both functions of the historical links that each phenomenon has, in its own way, to the Nineteenth-Century South’s treasonous slave-master elite and its toady peasant underclass. And I say that as a proud Southerner who likes his Faulkner and his red beans and rice as much as the next bubba.
WyldPirate
nancydarling”
You are stupid fuck, nancydarling as reading is fundamental.
Race isn’t mentioned in the goddamned passage you quoted. Moreover, it is a stone-cold fucking verified fact that blacks have higher rates of obesity, stroke, heart disease, etc in the South and elsewhere.
And to the rest of you sure “liberal, fair-minded compassionate” people, ya’ll can just go fuck yourselves, because you are a bunch of fake cocksuckers–especially the ones making the wise-cracks about folks dying.
These are horrible diseases that are chronic and linked together and they all exacerbate each other. Moreover, these diseases more heavily affect the poor, whether they are black or white because of a variety of factors. And the facts are, there are more black folks living in poverty than there are white folks in most areas of the South.
YEah, some of you asswipes just care soooo much….go on and smear away just because they don’t vote the way you like. A lot of the people some of you dickwads are smearing DO VOTE the way you like.
nancydarling
Wow. Somebodies buttons got pushed. Um, I believe it did say race was one factor adjusted for. Blather on asshole.
arguingwithsignposts
@wyldpirate: wow, even for you, that is fail.
Oops.
Dr. Morpheus
Who’s smearing? Cole points out study showing a decline in cognitive abilities that strongly correlates with geographical region after controlling for race, age, gender, etc.
BOB selectively quotes said study and says it’s because of all those ni- that live there.
nancydarling and others point out he’s a racist asshole and is fooling no one. And then you jump in the fray spewing bullshit at everyone EXCEPT BOB.
Try buying a clue Sherlock.
Tonal Crow
Pirate: Try a little less swagger and knife-brandishing, and a little more reading. John gave you the link to the study itself. Read it. You’ll find that the authors adjusted for race and several other factors. Maybe you can quibble about how they made the adjustment — I haven’t explored the details. But it’s just incorrect to imply that they didn’t adjust for race, and worse to (incorrectly) upbraid others for having mis-stated the study.
WyldPirate
nancydarling
Too fucking lazy to read what you wrote I see you lazy
asswipe…go back and read it.
And what pushed my button was:
“Stupid is contagious.”
“Our nation that those states committed treason against.”
“primary cause: excessive love of jesus”
“Primary cause: Federal moneez. Let’s cut them off.”
“Yes. That and pig ignorance”
nancydarling
The very sad thing about this is that it is going to be worse in the future as the current population ages. My emotions run the gamut from anger to despair when I go shopping here in NW Arkansas and see the obese tooling around in motorized shopping carts because they can’t walk far enough to get their groceries. I’m talking people 30 years younger than I am.
ETA There are less than a dozen blacks in my county. All the chubbies I see are white
nancydarling
Is that an apology, Wyld?. I can’t tell. You must admit that BOB IS a dumbass.
arguingwithsignposts
@wyldpirate: too fucking lazy to check nyms i see, asswipe. @nancydarling didn’t say any of those things, and yet you chose to try to paint her with the snark of the thread, despite the fact that you fucked up and didn’t control for legitimate disagreement. Oops.
RSA
Wow. Teaching at a four-year college in the south, I really don’t want to know this.
WyldPirate
Tonal Crow @29
Point taken in the light of a single study which this most assuredly is, but my point was a bit larger if poorly expressed.
Cognitive impairment goes hand in hand with chronic diseases like obesity, heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure, particularly with the elderly. Moreover, many of these people are not well-educated and I’ve read several studies pointing to the fact that people with less education often experience cognitive decline earlier.
Lets have some studies on it beffore we go pinning this “cognitive decline” simply on geographic location. A lot of sttudies like this that are done are pure shit and flawed in design. If you want a good idea of how badly they are go read this– Lies, Damned Lies and Medical Science.
I’m pissed more than anything else about the “South bashing” that goes on here. Folks here claim to be so goddamned compassionate and concerned, but the people suffering the most severely from chronically poor health are poor blacks and poor white folks (and yeah the “poor white trash” are pitted against minorities), but it is not nearly as bad as it used to be. Not even close. I know as I have lived in this region for all but 8 of my 52 years.
A Humble Lurker
@WyldPirate
WTF?
arguingwithsignposts
Well, something everybody can agree on. Why didnt you say that first instead of getting your rage on?
WyldPirate
arguingwithposts:
I didn’t say nancydarling said those things. I said “what pushed my button was:” in response to nancydarling saying “I believe I pushed someones buttons”.
Laying plaque down in one’s arteries–which is what happens more often than not in people who are obese, eat shitty diets, have hypercholesterolemia, hyperlipidimia, diabetes and heart disease–doesn’t do much in the way of maintaining high cognitive function in later years, especially when your blood flows like syrup because of the fats, cholesterol and higher blood glucose levels.
But again, that’s beside the point. I’m steamed because of all of the gratuitous “South bashing”.
nancydarling
arguingwithsignposts. For a while things were getting better in the south—at least on the surface. Take a look at state legislatures and you will see that they are taking the area back to the 19th century, including my state of Arkansas. I honestly think after living here for 5 years that all the old habits and resentments have always been there, simmering beneath the surface. At a state blog I participate in here in AR, many of the posters are as hard on the south as any of the posters here.
arguingwithsignposts
@nancydarling: i grew up in texas in the era of lloyd bentsen and ann richards, then lived through most of GWB, and then moved to south carolina for several years, so i totally hear you.
@wyldpirate: i dont have a prob with you getting your rage on about south bashing ( although there’s some legitimacy to it), but @nancydarling wasn’t your target. And BoB is definitely not the hill you want to die on. Fwiw, my great-grandpa lived to over 90, milked the cows ever day and ate a diet rich in fat – eggs, bacon, etc. But he was a thin man, worked his fingers to the bone.
Tonal Crow
@arguingwithsignposts:
Truer words have rarely been spoken.
General Stuck
Having grown up in the south, and also living for years in the deep south, I stand by the general “pig ignorance” remark. Though it was not to be specific to any person or group of persons, but as a region and by individual states relating to how they conduct their business and politics and self governance as an aggregate.
When i bash a particular state or a region like the south, that is where it’s coming from. And if some folks get all butthurt out of some sense of pride or fealty to a certain state or region. Then if I was to include individual people onto my state/region bashing, they would likely qualify.
El Cid
__
As a native Southerner, I’ve mostly found that there are extraordinary lifelong capacities for recall when it comes to petty personal grudges and mythical incidents about how libruls stole money to give to the coloreds.
WyldPirate
Not that this will likely get read, but I probably do owe nancydarling a bit of an apology for going off on her because of accumulated “pissed-offedness” reading through the thread. I was simply reading through it and thinking “goddamn, these are real suffering people with horrible, debilitating chronic diseases and we get “southern bashing practically every other comment?”
So nancydarling, I’m sorry you got in the line of fire. Your’s was one of the more innocuous comments and I shouldn’t have let loose on you.
nancydarling
I didn’t get in the line of fire Wyld. You put me there. But, apology is noted and accepted.
Atticus Dogsbody
“CLEEETUS! Why kent I open the doah”
“It’s cos yore tryin’ to open the wall, Maw.”
Calming Influence
They adjusted for education LEVEL; what about education QUALITY? Do the the writings of the average high school graduate in the stroke belt have the same linguistic density as high school graduates in other parts of the country? Google “The Nun Study” to see why this might be a significant factor.
bertoldt
“I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Old times they are
notforgotten;Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land …”
Joel
Who needs environmental regulations?
jh46inaz
Which came first, the “Fucked Noise” chicken, or the “decline in cognitive ability” egg??
Joel
@dww44
Complete speculation, but my guess is that given the distribution of those states (note that Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington are marked), the culprit might be environmental. Lead isn’t just found in old paint chips. In states that allow(ed) industries to dump heavy metals into soil and riverbeds, it is very difficult to avoid exposure. Even the royal blue Seattle-Tacoma corridor is still recovering from the ASARCO smelter, and that plant shut down 25 years ago.
karen marie
WyldPirate – July 4, 2011 | 6:04 pm · Link
What, too close to home? Can’t handle the truth? Come on, you can talk here, it’s a safe place.
Xecky Gilchrist
Is it the fried food beloved by Southerners? Limited access to doctors? Too little exercise?
No love for hookworm?
MikeJ
I’m from one of those treasonous states, and I made the (second part of) the above comment. I moved the fuck out to get away from those fuckwits.
WyldPirate
efgoldman @52
What the fuck is the point in bring up the “treasonous acts” of 150 fucking years ago in a goddamned thread talking about people with chronic, debilitating disease? And why would you want to do that when many of those sick people are black or Hispanic or dirt-fucking poor?
It’s about as pointless–but thankfully less lengthy–than one of Dennis Green’s ignoramus exercises in flogging a dead horse post on the same subject. (Thankfuly, he seems to have disappeared.)
As for sending fucked up representatives to Congress, the South surely doesn’t have that market cornered. Seems like several of the states in the Midwest are having a hell of a time with ignoramus governors and legislatures at the moment.
With respect to racism, the South doesn’t have that “market” cornered either.
But by all means, if you want to rant and rave about something that happened 150 years ago, knock yourself out doing it. That’s a mighty fucking broad brush you’re slinging paint on people with, though.
Slowbama
Oh, this is an easy one. A large coffee intake has been shown to ward off Alzheimers/dementia quite handily. Southerners in general drink less coffee than folks in other places — the Southern Baptist influence.
CalD
There’s a fairly well documented link between diet and cognitive disorders. Digestive problems turn out to be fairly common in schizophrenics, autistic children and people with ms and other autoimmune diseases affecting the nervous system and treating the digestive issues with some variation on the Paleo or Specific Carbohydrate diet often results in improvements in neurological symptoms as well. The gut-brain connection currently isn’t well understood but it’s becoming harder and harder to ignore its existence.
Paleo and SCD also happen to be quite similar to the sugar management diets used to treat Type II diabetes and all of the above can help lower blood pressure and cholesterol and improve arterial and cardio health in general. And the thing they all have in common is the elimination of cereal grains, saturated fats and concentrated sweeteners such as table sugar and high fructose corn syrup.
So I’m gonna go with diet as my guess. (Deep fried ice cream, anyone?) It’s by no means just the south though. I’ve heard that the specialty of the Packers stadium in Wisconsin is a two-pound cheeseburger served on a glazed doughnut.
El Cid
__
One of the problems in speaking about “Southerners” is that that term is allowed to be used as if the only “Southerners” were whites, and conservative and rural ones at that.
“The South” as a somewhat coherent political construct is mainly about a white right wing hierarchy extending across political, economic, cultural, and of course state lines. (I.e., the bedrock support of the modern conservative capture of power.)
“The South” as a population ought be discussed like any other arbitrarily defined geographic expanse, i.e., based upon what exact peoples are under discussion.
The fairly recent Latino population here is Southern, too. As are the African Americans who live here, including many who recently moved here from outside the South. Or an Asian population large enough in Atlanta that Asian-oriented supermarket and dining complex with a mid- to high-income focus have been springing up within the very years that sales and business had been so weak in general.
Admiral_Komack
arguingwithsignposts @33, @ nancydarling:
Thank you.
Sloegin
Que up the researcher mantra; warrants further study.
Over a third of the states missing in the analysis, varying numbers of population samples per state, some (like Washington) bordering on being a statistically insignificant sample set, results being a clumped into slightly over and slightly under categories. Oh, yes and a cluster in the South, because that’s what the researchers were looking for.
Yeah.
And of course balloon juice being balloon juice and everyone having a stroke over Teh South.
bob h
Perhaps a lifetime of not using their brains has an effect, too.
On the 3rd we celebrated a battle that ensured we would permanently annex to ourselves a region of poverty and social backwardness, religious fundamentalism, and political reaction, giving us at the 150th anniversary a nation teetering on banana republichood.
not a gator
It’s diabesity. And, yes, it’s the diet.
Sweat tea.
Coca-cola.
Moon pies (trans fat).
Anything fried in peanut oil.
Cakes.
Milk cakes.
Blue bell.
Rancid picnic salads.
Corn syrup BBQ sauce.
Sugared coffee.
“Light bread”.
Fatty food with a soda chaser. (The sugar seems to have a worse effect on the body when combined with lots of fat.)
Sugared grits.
Big gulp.
(Sugar) ice pops.
Lydgate
geez, this study is pure catnip for balloon juice.