Rishi Wadhera explains ACC report on rural residents more likely to die from heart disease than urban residents

Patient data continue to underscore a growing health crisis in rural America, where residents are significantly more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than their urban counterparts.

A key article on this trend, published in full in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), reveals that while cardiovascular mortality was steadily declining nationwide from 2010 to 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic reversed that progress.[1]

"Cardiovascular mortality was declining in rural and urban areas between 2010 and 2019. But the pandemic basically wiped away all that progress, and we saw reversal in these trends and a big increase in cardiovascular mortality in rural areas. There was also an increase in urban areas, but much smaller. So disparities widened," explained lead author Rishi Wadhera, MD, MPP, MPhil, associate director of the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Center for Outcomes Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He spoke to Cardiovascular Business about the study and overall data trends from other studies in the above video interview.