Deaths from cardiovascular disease (CVD) are on the decline in the United States, according to new findings presented virtually at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology, Prevention, Lifestyle & Cardiometabolic Health Conference 2021.
The analysis included U.S. mortality data from all 1980 to 2014. CVD mortality may be down, researchers noted, but significant problems still remain—and counties with especially poor outcomes don’t appear to be making much progress.
“We were surprised to find that even though CVD death rates improved across the country, including in areas where rates had been among the highest and the lowest, relative differences across county groups and existing disparities among counties didn’t change,” lead author Shreya Rao, MD, a cardiovascular fellow at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said in a statement. “Counties that started with the highest rates of death continued to perform worse than other counties, and those with the lowest rates of death stayed the lowest during the study period.”
While the U.S. counties with the lowest mortality were located throughout the country, the authors observed, the counties with the highest mortality were almost all located in the Deep South, Appalachia and the South Atlantic region that includes such states as Maryland, West Virginia and Georgia. These are all areas associated with higher rates of heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes and obesity.
The research team also noted that countries with the highest CVD mortality rates were more likely to include a high proportion of non-white residents, a high proportion of residents who did not complete high school and higher rates of violent crime.
“We observed that counties with high mortality trajectory had a higher proportion of Black adults and worse measures of social distress, including higher housing vacancy rates and violent crime rates and low levels of high school education,” Rao said. “This isn’t a coincidence. It’s important to understand that structural and environmental characteristics are not randomly distributed.”
Michael has more than 16 years of experience as a professional writer and editor. He has written at length about cardiology, radiology, artificial intelligence and other key healthcare topics.