Stroke Statistics 2009 is divided into five chapters.

• Chapter 1 documents trends and patterns in stroke mortality and premature mortality.
• Chapter 2 reports on the morbidity burden of stroke, both in terms of prevalence (the rate of people who have had a stroke in the past) and incidence (the rate of first ever strokes).
• Chapter 3 describes the burden of stroke on the National Health Service, in terms of drug therapy, hospitalisations and surgical procedures.
• Chapter 4 provides estimates of the prevalence of risk factors for stroke, broken down by age, sex, socioeconomic status and ethnicity. Details about Government targets to tackle the risk factor status of the population are also provided where available.
• Chapter 5 provides new estimates, calculated specifically for Stroke Statistics, of the economic cost of stroke to the National Health Service and to the United Kingdom economy. To see how the economic costs were calculated, please click here.

Stroke Statistics 2009 is jointly published by the British Heart Foundation and the Stroke Association.

Compiled by Peter Scarborough, Viv Peto, Prachi Bhatnagar, Asha Kaur, Jose Leal, Ramon Luengo-Fernandez, Alastair Gray, Mike Rayner and Steven Allender, British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group and Health Economics Research Centre, Department of Public Health, University of Oxford, Old Road Campus, Headington, Oxford, OX3 7LF.  www.dphpc.ox.ac.uk/bhfhprg

Individual sections of this publication are available below as separate PDFs.