MODESTO – Stanislaus County’s health statistics for 2024 show a trend in the right direction, but the numbers lag behind state and national averages, according to a report presented at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting.
Heart disease and cancer were the top two causes of death among county residents in 2024, accounting for 24 and 19 percent of deaths, respectively. Dementia was third at 7.6 percent.
When all the causes of death are added, the result is what’s known as the all-cause age-adjusted death rate. That rate for 2024 was 869 deaths per 100,000, a slight improvement from 2023 when it was 901.
“But if you look at that age-adjusted total all-cause rate compared to California as a whole, it’s higher,” said county Public Health Officer Dr. Thea Papasozomenos. “For California it was 624 compared to ours, and for the U.S. it was 722 per 100,000.
“Death rate and life expectancy are two sides of the same coin. They’re key summary measures that are inversely related to each other. As death rates increase, life expectancy declines. And conversely as death rates decrease, life expectancy increases. So, if we have higher death rates overall, that means our life expectancy compared to the U.S. and California are going to be lower.”
The county’s life expectancy in 2024 for males and females combined was 77.3 years. The overall life expectancy in California which traditionally has a higher life expectancy than many states, was 81.2 years. In the U.S. overall it was 79 years.
“In general, while these measures all worsened during pandemic for the U.S., for California and for Stanislaus County, life-expectancy and all-cause death rate are back to a direction of improvement since the pandemic.”
Stanislaus County’s heart-disease death rate of 207 per 100,000 residents is higher than the rates for California and the nation. Heart disease is a broad category, grouping diseases such as valvular heart disease, ischemic heart disease, hypertensive heart disease, and congestive heart failure.
What has driven much of the decrease in deaths from heart disease is the decrease in deaths from ischemic heart disease (caused by plaque buildup in the arteries), which is the leading cause of heart attacks.
“The good news is we have all sorts of interventions to target heart diseases,” said Papasozomenos. “We have cholesterol medication, we have bystander CPR, we’ve made tremendous advances in interventions for acute heart attacks, we have stent placements that open the heart vessels and keep them open. So, the great news is that people are surviving acute events like heart attacks. Or we’re able to prevent and control atherosclerosis, so that people aren’t even having heart attacks.”
Cancer death rates in the county, like those from heart disease, are higher than state and U.S. norms.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of death in in the county at 26 percent, followed by breast and prostate cancer at 23 percent, and colon cancer at 12 percent.
26, breast 23, prostate 23, colon 12. But, overall, cancer deaths are declining since 2019.
One area where Stanislaus County exceeded the state as a whole was in deaths due to low birth weight, though up slightly from 2019.
The three-year averages in Stanislaus County for 2019-2021 was 6.5 percent, better than the state’s 7.1 percent. In 2020-2022, the county outpaced the state 6.8 percent to 7.2 percent, and in 2021-2023 the county rate was 7.0 percent while the state rate was 7.4 percent.
