Bylord RCP training may have contributed less deaths due to heart attack in the last five decades
Piyamas Dulmunsumphun / Alamy Stock Photo
Deaths due to heart attacks have collapsed in the US. In the last 50 years, while deaths from chronic heart conditions have shot themselves, likely because people live longer.
“We have really achieved great progress in certain areas of mortality from heart disease, but now we are seeing this change,” Sara King, from Stanford University in California.
She and her colleagues gathered data on deaths from cardiac death from 1970 to 2022 using the Wonder database of the control centers and the prevention of diseases of the United States, which tracks all the deaths recorded in the country.
They discovered that in 2022, heart disease represented 24 percent of all deaths in the US.
“Incredible progress has been made to reduce deaths from heart attacks in the last 50 years,” says King. This includes new therapies, such as cardiac stems, coronary artery referral surgery and mediations that reduce cholesterol. Public health measures, such as BYSTOPER RCP training and efforts to reduce smoking rates, have probably also helped, says King.
Thus, heart disease remains the main murderer of the country, mainly because deaths from other types of heart disease, mostly chronic conditions, have increased 81 percent during the same period. For example, deaths from heart failure, arrhythmia and hypertensive heart disease increased 146 percent, 106 percent and 450 percent, respectively.
“Many of these conditions are conditions that come with age,” says King. “For us, it seems that people who now survive the thesis heart attacks live longer and have more time to develop chronic cardiac conditions.”
However, the data can exaggerate the change in deaths from heart disease. “There are many different causes that could lead to someone’s death, and that can lead to erroneous classification or excessive simplification,” says King. For example, many people who for heart failure after having survived a heart attack. “The underlying cause of that heart failure remains the blockages in those coronary arteries, so it is not black and white,” says King.
Even so, most deaths from heart disease clearly are no longer due to heart attacks. “It will be important that we focus on these other growing causes of mortality,” says King. “Finding ways to age healthy will be the next border in cardiology.”
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