Forgive me if this is already posted. I just found this article ironic.
By Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY
Heart disease deaths in the USA have fallen below the American Heart Association's prevention goal for 2010, and deaths from strokes are nearing their own record low, the AHA said Tuesday.
But epidemics of diabetes, obesity and inactivity, along with widespread racial, economic and geographic differences in access to care, threaten those gains, warns AHA president Daniel Jones.
"Unless we can find a new strategy to stem diabetes and obesity, we can anticipate a new wave of cardiovascular disease deaths," Jones says. He noted that heart disease is still the nation's leading killer, and stroke ranks third.
New government data show that heart disease death rates dropped 25.8% between 1999 and 2005, from 195 to 144 deaths for every 100,000 people, surpassing the AHA's 25% target reduction. Stroke deaths dropped 24.4%, from 61 to 47 deaths per 100,000.
That adds up to roughly 160,000 lives saved in 2005, Jones says. If the trend holds, the AHA projects that as many as 240,000 lives may be saved this year.
The analysis of data released by the National Center for Health Statistics doesn't explain why death rates continue to fall. Studies suggest people are eating better, smoking less and getting better medical care than Americans of previous generations, says Paul Ridker of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
Ridker says improved methods of preventing and treating cardiovascular disease have paid off. "Not only have they reduced the number of events, but when events occur, we're more likely to survive them," he says.
These advances didn't benefit everyone, AHA notes. The death rate for blacks dropped by 23.8%, compared with 25.6% for whites. "While overall statistics look better for the U.S. as a whole," Ridker says, "a major portion of our population is not benefiting from this shift."
Heart disease death rates fell among women by 26.9%, and stroke deaths among women were down 23.7%.
Signs of trouble loom on the horizon, among them twin epidemics of diabetes and obesity in young people, says Daniel Levy of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Framingham study, a 50-year-old examination of heart disease in a Massachusetts community.
"We haven't yet paid the full price in heart disease and stroke deaths for the obesity epidemic in our children that began 25 years ago," he says.
