“Deaths from heart attacks have plummeted in the US over the past 50 years, whereas deaths from chronic heart conditions have skyrocketed, probably due to people living longer.

‘We’ve made some really great progress in certain areas of heart disease mortality, but now we’re seeing this shift,’ says Sara King at Stanford University in California.

She and her colleagues collected data on heart disease deaths from 1970 to 2022 using the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER database, which tracks all recorded fatalities in the country.

They found that in 2022, heart disease accounted for 24 per cent of all deaths in the US, down from 41 per cent in 1970. The decline is largely thanks to an almost 90 per cent decrease in heart attack deaths, which were once the deadliest form of heart disease…

Even so, heart disease remains the country’s top killer, mainly because deaths from other types of heart disease – mostly chronic conditions – have increased 81 per cent over the same period. For instance, fatalities from heart failure, arrhythmia and hypertensive heart disease have risen 146 per cent, 106 per cent and 450 per cent, respectively.

‘A lot of these conditions are conditions that come with age,’ says King. ‘To us, it seems like people that are now surviving these heart attacks are living longer and having more time to sort of develop these chronic heart conditions.'”

From New Scientist.