CSO data shows heart disease and stroke took almost 6,000 lives in 2017

Heart disease and stroke killed almost 6,000 people in Ireland in 2017, with cancers and heart disease accounting for more than 60 per cent of all deaths, the latest data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) shows.

According to the CSO’s Vital Statistics Yearly Summary for 2017, in total diseases of the circulatory system accounted for 8,927 deaths or an annual rate of 1.9 per 1,000 population.  Of these, 4,238 were due to ischaemic heart disease and 1,710 to cerebrovascular disease or stroke, equalling a total of 5,948 deaths.

In total there were 30,484 deaths registered in 2017, of which 15,497 were male and 14,987 were female. This equates to a death rate of 6.4 per 1,000 population. The 2017 figure is 8.7 per cent higher than in 2007 when 28,050 deaths were registered.

There were 25,026 deaths of persons aged 65 and over registered last year, this accounts for over four-fifths of all deaths registered in 2017.

The CSO figures also revealed that there were 62,053 births registered in 2017, some 1,844 (or 2.9%) fewer than 2016 and a fall of 12.1% since 2007. This represented an annual birth rate of 12.9 per 1,000 of population compared to 16.1 per 1,000 population in 2007.

The average age of first time mothers in 2017 was 31, up 0.1 years from 2016. The average age of mothers for all births registered in 2017 was 32.8 years, compared to 32.7 in 2016 and 31.1 years in 2007.

Over a third, 23,340 (37.6%), of babies were born outside of marriage/civil partnerships and of these 58.9 per cent were to cohabitating parents. A total of 1,041 teenagers had babies in 2017 and of these 19 were aged under 16. There were 4,242 births to mothers aged 40 and over in 2017 and of these, 309 were aged 45 and over.

Births to mothers of Irish nationality accounted for more than three-quarters (77.3%) of births in 2017. A further 2.2 per cent of births were to mothers of UK nationality, with 1.9 per cent born to mothers from EU15 countries (excluding Ireland and the UK).