New research published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association indicated there has been a drop in heart disease-related deaths over the last 50 years, but it remains a leading cause of death throughout the U.S.
According to the American Heart Association, when adjusted for age, deaths attributed to heart attacks dropped a whopping 90% in the last 50 years in the U.S., while deaths caused by heart disease fell by about 66%.
In 1970, heart disease was responsible for about 41% of overall deaths. By 2022, that figure dropped to about 22%. At the time, over half of heart disease-related deaths were caused by heart attacks. In 2022, that proportion dropped to 29%.
The report indicated that deaths caused by heart failure, hypertensive heart disease and arrhythmia accounted for 47% of heart disease-related deaths in 2022, up from 9% in 1970.
“This distribution shift in the types of heart disease people were dying from the most was very interesting to us,” said the study’s first author, Dr. Sara King, a second-year internal medicine resident in the department of medicine at Stanford School of Medicine in Stanford, California. “This evolution over the past 50 years reflects incredible successes in the way heart attacks and other types of ischemic heart disease are managed."
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The American Heart Association said technologies, including the invention in the 1960s of coronary artery bypass grafting and the formation of coronary care units, improved in-hospital and long-term heart disease death rates.
Heart disease death rates improved despite a rising obesity rate, which has also caused hypertension rates to increase.
“All of these risk factors contribute to an ongoing burden of heart disease, especially as related to heart failure, hypertensive heart disease and arrhythmias,” said the senior author of the paper, Dr. Latha Palaniappan. “While heart attack deaths are down by 90% since 1970, heart disease hasn’t gone away. Now that people are surviving heart attacks, we are seeing a rise in other forms of heart disease like heart failure."
The study's authors note that there are likely substantial differences in these reductions in heart disease deaths by age, sex, race, ethnicity, region and urbanization. The authors also encourage people to take steps to improve heart health, including diet, exercise and avoiding tobacco and alcohol.
