US Sees 90 Percent Drop In Heart Attack Deaths Over Last 50 Years

According to a new study that analyzed data from over 119 million people, deaths from heart attacks have dropped by nearly 90 percent over the last five decades – but deaths from other types of heart disease are on the rise.

Heart attacks, also known as myocardial infarctions, are the result of a lack of blood or oxygen reaching the heart via the coronary arteries, the blood vessels that supply oxygenated blood to the heart. As a result, the heart muscle begins to get damaged and die, affecting its ability to function as normal.

Looking at mortality data from the National Vital Statistics System, the authors behind the new study found that this type of event was responsible for 354 in every 100,000 deaths in the US back in 1970. By 2022, however, deaths from the same cause had plummeted to 40 per 100,000, a drop of 89 percent.

One potential reason for this drop, the team explains, is that while people may still have heart attacks, we’re now better equipped to deal with them. The last 50 years have seen enormous strides made in public awareness of things like CPR, the signs of a heart attack, and lifestyle factors that can increase the risk of a heart attack, while medications like beta blockers and statins are all likely to have contributed to the decline too.

However, surviving a heart attack doesn’t mean that someone is completely unscathed from the event – it can cause permanent damage. Research suggests that chronic heart conditions such as heart failure and atrial fibrillation both occur more frequently in people who’ve had heart attacks than those who haven’t.

“People now are surviving these acute events, so they have the opportunity to develop these other heart conditions,” said study author Sara King, MD, speaking to the Stanford Medicine News Center.

It’s just one of a number of potential reasons why we’re now seeing an increasing shift towards deaths from non-ischemic heart disease – conditions that aren’t caused blockage of blood flow to the heart, such as heart failure and hypertensive heart disease. King and colleagues found that deaths from such conditions increased by 81 percent – 68 per 100,000 to 123 per 100,000 – from 1970 to 2022.

Besides increased survival from hearts attacks, the authors also suggest that a rise in heart disease risk factors such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and physical inactivity could be to blame, as well as an aging population.

“Often it’s the passage of time that can lead to conditions such as atrial fibrillation or heart failure,” King said. “Finding ways to age healthily is going to be the next frontier of heart care.”

It’s a case of good news-bad news. A decline in deaths from heart attacks is good, but heart disease is still the country’s leading cause of death, and the data shows we need to be giving more attention to other heart conditions.

“Fortunately, people are dying less from ischemic disease. Now, we need to expand our efforts to non-ischemic causes of heart disease death,” King said. “We have so many tools in our toolbox now, but still, there’s a lot more that can be developed and improved.”

“I hope the numbers just keep getting better.”

The study is published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.