10 October 2018
Prevention is the key to reducing heart disease and stroke, and it starts with knowing the risks. The following indicators are all linked to heart disease. For each of the province's 33 communities, we looked at how many of these indicators are worse than average, and flagged these areas as "alerts" for the community to look at.
- Hypertension
- Diabetes
- Blood pressure checks
- Cholesterol checks
- Obesity rates
- Smoking
- Eating fruit and vegetables
- Physical activity
- Heavy drinking
- Living in low-income households
- No high school diploma
- Discussing health improvement with health professionals
Key findings include
- In general, communities with three alerts or more are associated with more heart disease and strokes, poorer self-rated health and more chronic conditions
- Campbellton and Neguac scored the worse with six alerts each
- Riverview, Dieppe, Quispamsis and Douglas are on the opposite end, with no alerts. This doesn't mean that there are no problems in these communities, but that they fare better (not worse than average) compared to the rest of the province.
The following table summarizes the information. Click on it to download it as a PDF brochure.
