A new UF study suggests that just visiting coastal regions of North Carolina, South Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia may increase the risk of dying from a stroke.
Ilan Shrira, a UF psychologist, found that people who visited the area known as the "stroke buckle" became 11 percent more likely to suffer from a fatal stroke.
The buckle is part of the larger "stroke belt," which spreads across eight Southeastern states including Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee.
Florida is not in the belt.
In the study, Shrira found that residents who left the region were also 10 percent less likely to die following a stroke.
Researchers compared death certificates dating from 1979 to 1988 of all residents and nonresidents of the 153 counties that make up the buckle.
Shrira collaborated with two researchers for the study, including George Howard, a biostatistician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health.
Howard said the risk of stroke death in the "stroke buckle" is about twice as high as the rest of the country.
There are several possible causes for the increased risk of stroke, including hypertension, infection, genetic factors and quality of health care, he said. The fact that this region affects visitors as well as residents seems to point to short-term factors playing a role, he said.
But such theories are difficult to test, he said, and there is not enough good data to draw any conclusions yet.
