Thank you for downloading this program from BBC Radio 4. I'm Tim Halford.

Hello and welcome to more or less your weekly guide to the numbers in news and in life.

This week we abandoned politics completely. Well, not completely. We will be asking if the UK

electoral system was based on proportional representation who would be the Prime Minister right now.

But we'll also be asking whether it's true that lots of teachers quit the job before finishing

their first year. And we'll be talking about computers that just can't count large numbers,

such as the number of times this video has been viewed.

And we'll be handing out a more or less seal of approval gold star to a newspaper that's

admitted a statistical error. But first, a number of listeners have got in touch over a

news story earlier this week. There's been a big increase in the number of cases of stroke

among relatively younger people. There's a sharp rise in the number of strokes among people

in their 40s and early 50s in the past. The association says there's been a big increase

in the number of cases of stroke being suffered by people of working age.

Many people seem to be skeptical about this and they've asked us to look into the numbers,

which come from the Stroke Association, a charity. The Stroke Association analyzed hospital

admissions data for NHS England and found some alarming increases. For men aged 40 to 54,

for example, admissions for strokes have risen over the past decade and a half by 2000 to over

6000. They've rocketed as the Stroke Association put it. Admissions for women of the same age

rose by a third and for 20 to 64 year olds in general, they rose by a quarter. As the chief

executive of the Stroke Association put it, there is an alarming increase in the numbers of people

having a stroke in working age. But is there? This is Tony Rudd, a professor at Kings College London

and also NHS England's National Clinical Director of Stroke. He doesn't think so.

...