Another year, another AHA report reasserting heart disease’s dominance as the number one killer in the United States, and the latest data shows that this trend is still gaining momentum.
- Every year, the AHA reports the most up-to-date statistics related to heart disease, stroke, and cardiovascular risk factors.
- In 2010, the AHA released a 2020 goal to improve the CV health of all Americans by 20%, while reducing CVD and stroke deaths by 20%.
Four years after that goal’s due date, the burden of CVD in the U.S. is at an all time high, with 942k cardiovascular disease-related deaths in 2022, up by 10k from 2021.
- Nearly half of all Americans over 20 (48.6% as of 2020) have some form of CVD (comprising CHD, HF, stroke, and hypertension).
- Excluding hypertension (CHD, HF, and stroke only), just 9.9% of U.S. adults have CVD.
What’s causing this high CVD prevalence? While there’s no one answer for a specific patient group, the AHA’s biggest CVD risk culprits should be pretty familiar – obesity, smoking/tobacco use, and sedentary behavior.
- From 2017 to 2020, adult obesity prevalence in the U.S. was 41.8%, while obesity-related CV deaths tripled from 1999 to 2020 (2.2 to 6.6 deaths per 100k people).
- Sedentary behavior is also on the rise in America, with self-reported daily sitting times increasing from 332 min/day in 2007 to 351 min/day in 2017.
- The percentage of U.S. adult smokers is now down to 11.5% (it was 51% of men in 1965), although smokers still face a nearly three-fold higher all-cause mortality risk (HR: 2.80).
However, there’s light at the end of the cardiovascular tunnel thanks to advancements in drugs like GLP-1s and new cholesterol controls, which mean heart disease isn’t a death sentence like it used to be.
The Takeaway
The AHA’s latest report reads more like a public health problem than a cardiology one, suggesting that prevention could have a greater impact than any drug, device, or treatment.
