Over the past forty years, even if the condition is still the number one cause of death, Cardiovascular disease has been slowly declining across most parts of the United States. The data came as result of an observational meta-analysis during which researchers from the CDC looked at heart disease deaths starting with 1973 and ending with 2010.
Cardiovascular disease is a bigger term that covers many conditions, including coronary artery disease
The study, published in the March 22 edition of the journal Circulation, evaluated the data from all counties in the US recording Cardiovascular disease deaths from a period covering 1973 through 2010. Across the country, the rate of death fell by almost 62 percent during the period, but individual counties’ rates varied widely.
While some counties experienced a 64% or even 83% decrease, others only saw a decline of 9%. According to the study, the counties with the smallest decreases were in no particular order some parts of Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Mississippi.
“But from other studies we know the socioeconomic conditions of a county can affect rates of smoking and obesity, or whether people have access to affordable, healthy food, for example,” said Casper, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to Dr. Donald Barr, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, the issue is clearly social.
Southern states, he said, often have higher rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes and kidney disease, which are risk factors for Cardiovascular disease. And social conditions — from poverty and low education levels, to racial injustice — are at the root of the problem, Barr said.
“Social risk factors for heart disease are more common in the South,” he said. “This disparity [in heart disease deaths] is not about hospital care. It’s about broader social structure.”
For the study, Casper’s team looked at U.S. counties’ rates of death from heart disease between 1973 and 2010. Nationwide, the researchers found, those deaths fell by about 62 percent.
But counties varied widely, the study found. In counties with the smallest improvements, heart disease deaths fell by anywhere from 9 percent to 50 percent. And those counties were concentrated in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and parts of Texas.
According to study for Cardiovascular disease
- Declines in heart disease death rates ranged from 9.2 percent to 83.4 percent among U.S. counties in the past four decades.
- Counties with the slowest declines (9.2 to 49.6 percent) were primarily concentrated in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
- The fastest county declines (64.1 to 83.4 percent) were largely found in the northern half of the nation.
- Overall, the magnitude of geographic inequality in heart disease death rates nearly doubled during the course of the study.
In contrast, counties with the greatest improvements saw death rates drop between 64 percent and 83 percent — and they were mostly in the North.
In the early 1970s, almost half of counties in the Northeast were considered to have high rates of death from heart disease, versus the rest of the country. By 2010, that had plummeted to just 4 percent of Northeastern counties.
The South, however, has seen the opposite trend. In 2010, 38 percent of the region’s counties had high death rates from heart disease, versus 24 percent in the 1970s.
Like the Northeast, the Midwest showed a decline in counties with high heart disease death rates. In 2010, 6 percent of its counties fell into that category. The West had, by far, the lowest death rates in the 1970s, and it’s still home to most of the nation’s “low-rate clusters,” the study found.
Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death in the U.S., killing an average of 610,000 people per year. It accounts for 1 in 4 deaths, even though the fatality rate has been in steep decline of 29% between 2003 and 2013. It took a decade, but it seems that both prevention and treatment options are getting better. At the very least, for some parts of the country.
The hope, she said, is that counties and communities can use this information to “look at local factors” that could affect heart disease rates.
According to CDC, Heart disease-related deaths are largely preventable, and with targeted public health efforts/h3>
The team of researchers analyzed death certificates of people from around 3,000 counties in the U.S. between 1973 and 2010 who were 35 years old or above. The analysis resulted in an interesting discovery and shift in regions which became more affected by heart disease. Four decades ago, back in the 1970s, the highest rate of cardiovascular problems was found in parts of the Northeast, through Appalachia, and into the Midwest, along with North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
Barr said other research points to a shift in the type of heart disease that’s killing Americans these days. Heart disease, he explained, includes coronary heart disease, where fatty plaques build up in the heart arteries and can eventually cause a heart attack.
According to the lead author of the study, Dr. Michele Casper, from the CDC’s Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, this provides local communities with important information. While the study did not discover the reason behind the geographic shift in heart disease decline, it’s possible that it might be due to some systematic changes. This includes dietary habits, public policies, opportunities for physical activity, access to health care, and more smoke-free areas.
It’s not well understood yet, but it is significant to note that some states have fared better. It’s now in the hands of physicians to determine the precise methods and understand the association between these patterns. More research would benefit the medical community and the population overall. And, hopefully, it would lead to further decline in death rates of the number one killer in the country.
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