Heart Disease Deaths in U.S. Increase

Monday, September 02, 2019

GoLocalPDX News Team

Heart disease deaths are increasing — 47 million people in the United States are living with cardiometabolic disorders such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and high blood pressure.

Death rates from these conditions have either plateaued or increased.

According to the JAMA medical report, there was a spike in cardiometabolic death rates starting in 2010.

In their study, senior author Sadiya S. Khan, MD, MSc, and colleagues found that while the overall rate of heart disease deaths fell by around 36% between 2000 and 2014, the rate of decline started slowing after 2010. Deaths from stroke and diabetes declined between 1999 and 2010 but leveled off after that; deaths from high blood pressure increased between 1999 and 2017.

“It appears unlikely that strategic goals from the American Heart Association (20% reduction by 2020) will be achieved,” Khan, a cardiologist at Northwestern Medicine, et al. wrote in JAMA. “To clarify the most recent national trends, we investigated CVD and other key cardiometabolic disease mortality rates overall, by sex and by race from 1999 to 2017.”

There was also an alarming disparity with higher death rates among black Americans.