The United States has an ever-growing list of belts. You know of the Bible Belt, where evangelical Christianity reigns supreme. The Rust Belt is the former hotbed of mid-Atlantic industrialization. There’s a whole subsection of belts related to health issues, like the Stroke Belt, Diabetes Belt, and the Obesity Belt. Now, we can add another to the list: the Epilepsy Belt.
According to a new study published in JAMA Neurology, researchers from Houston Methodist Research Institute and Case Western Reserve University sifted through Medicare data from 2016 to 2019. They found that older adults in the southeastern U.S. are significantly more likely to develop epilepsy than seniors anywhere else.
Roughly 20,000 new cases popped up in 2019, but they didn’t spread evenly. States like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and Florida saw an explosion in epilepsy rates.
New Research Shows a Southern ‘Epilepsy Belt’ in America
Epilepsy is a disorder where the brain occasionally decides to fire off rogue electrical signals, and it can happen to anyone. But older adults are especially vulnerable. The study’s authors say local environmental and social factors appear to shape who is hit hardest. For whatever reason, the South, in particular, is getting hit especially hard.
The reasons are varied. Some of it starts with sleep. Rates of insufficient sleep are higher in many of these states. Chronic sleep deprivation is a common trigger for epileptic seizures. Extreme heat plays a role, and so southern states are no strangers to punishing heat waves. This study is the first to demonstrate a strong national-level association between heat and new-onset epilepsy in older adults.
On top of those factors, you have the high rates of uninsured people, which compounds the problem by delaying diagnosis. Add it all together, and you’ve got a region primed for a rise in neurological issues.
I mentioned the Stroke Belt earlier. That plays a role in this, too. Strokes are a significant cause of epilepsy, so it should be no surprise that the two belts overlap like a Venn diagram.
Luckily, nowadays, epilepsy can be managed with medication, along with lifestyle adjustments and surgical procedures. The researchers say their findings suggest that even though medical science has made tremendous strides in treating epilepsy. There’s still plenty of room to improve our health infrastructure to reduce epilepsy rates in the South, such as improving sleep, strengthening heat resilience as climate change bears down on us, and improving access to medical care so people can be diagnosed and treated sooner.
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