(Press-News.org) After decades of decline, fatal coronary heart disease may rise again unless Americans modify three major risk factors: smoking, drinking, and obesity.
A Rutgers study just published in American Heart Journal found that deaths from coronary heart disease among people ages 25 to 84 dropped to 236,953 in 2019 from 397,623 in 1990, even though Americans’ median age increased to 38 from 33 over the last three decades.
Between 1990 and 2019, the US age-standardized coronary heart disease mortality rate per 100,000 fell from 210.5 to 66.8 for females (4 percent decline per year) and from 442.4 to 156.7 for males (3.7 percent decline per year). However, the decline has slowed significantly since 2011. Those born after 1980 were actually at slightly increased risk of dying from coronary heart disease at any age than people from the previous generation.
The findings echo those from the same team’s investigation of stroke-related deaths in the US.
Rutgers researchers noted while future advances in treatment continue reducing fatal heart disease, complementary lifestyle modifications may play an important role. It estimated that the elimination of smoking, drinking, and obesity would have prevented half of the deaths observed during the study period.
“The overall numbers are good. We saw a substantial decline in deaths from all types of coronary heart disease for both females and males,” said Cande Ananth, chief of the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and lead author of the study. “However, because we examined how these three modifiable risk factors affected mortality rates, we can see that there is room for considerable improvement.”
Tobacco usage is already headed in the right direction: The percentage of Americans who smoked tobacco fell to 14 percent in 2019 from 26 percent in 1990. Obesity rates, on the other hand, rose sharply during the study period to 43 percent in 2019 from 12 percent in 1990. Alcohol usage rose slightly during the study period.
In addition to the reduction in smoking, other factors driving the decline in coronary heart disease mortality included statins (which lower cholesterol), better diagnostic tests, and more frequent use of those tests.
“Although myocardial infarctions happen without warning, the other two major types of coronary heart disease — chronic ischemic heart disease and atherosclerotic heart disease — can be diagnosed and treated years before they damage the heart muscles,” said Ananth, whose analyses of past trends aspire to improve future care.
To achieve this, Ananth’s research team analyzes the largest possible datasets to differentiate risk among various patient subsets. The new study used anonymized data from the National Center for Health Statistics to track all heart disease fatalities in the targeted age range for the three-decade period.
“The ultimate goal is to help inform standards of care and public health priorities by determining which patients face the highest level of risk for cardiovascular events,” Ananth said. “Although increased screening and population-wide interventions are possible, the returns are likely to be minimal, at best, while costs will be prohibitively high. We need to maximize returns from our limited resources by identifying high-risk subsets of patients and targeting intervention to them.”
The team’s next study will analyze cardiovascular disease risk among pregnant patients.
END
Fatal heart disease has plummeted since 1990, but progress has stalled
2023-08-03
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
UCF, MIT designing technology to fight bacterial infections, improve aquaculture farming
2023-08-03
UCF, MIT Designing Technology To Fight Bacterial Infections, Improve Aquaculture Farming
BY SUHTLING WONG | AUGUST 3, 2023 11:11 AM
UCF and MIT researchers are using farm-raised seafood as a model to create new technologies that fight pathogenic bacteria.
University of Central College of Medicine microbiologist Dr. Salvador Almagro-Moreno and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Dr. Otto Cordero were recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to create synthetic microbiomes – communities of microorganisms – that will better protect aquatic environments from bacteria.
The team ...
Researchers discuss the ethical challenges of studying DNA from a 18th–19th century African American community
2023-08-03
A population genetics team recently identified the genetic relationship between over 40,000 23andMe users and a population of enslaved and free African Americans that lived in Catoctin Furnace, Maryland between 1776–1850. Over the course of this study, the researchers considered how best to inform descendants and other genetic relatives of their genetic connection to the site. The group has published their considerations and the ethical questions they have encountered on August 3rd in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
“This study required us to consider several ethical issues that had not been explicitly addressed in the existing literature ...
Tropical trees use social distancing to maintain biodiversity
2023-08-03
Tropical forests often harbor hundreds of species of trees in a square mile, but scientists often struggle to understand how such a diversity of species can coexist. In a study published in Science, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have provided new insights into the answer by uncovering a key characteristic of the spatial distribution of adult trees.
Combining computational modeling with data collected during a 30-year period, the researchers discovered that adult trees in a Panamanian forest are three times as distant from other adults of the same species as what the proverbial “the apple doesn’t fall far from ...
Ferroelectric material is now elastic
2023-08-03
A research group led by Prof. LI Runwei at the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have proposed a "slight crosslinking" method that imparts elastic recovery to ferroelectric materials.
The study was published in Science.
Ferroelectric materials are very useful for applications such as data storage and processing, sensing, energy conversion, and optoelectronics, etc., making them highly desirable in mobile phones, tablets and other ...
Editorial: Turning the tide on obesity?
2023-08-03
In an Editorial, Cynthia Bulik and Andrew Hardaway highlight the recent advances in medical treatments for obesity and weight loss. “With the emergence of new, highly effective weight-loss drugs, might the ‘fat decades’ become a closed chapter in the history of public health?” ask the authors. The “obesity epidemic” is a global health concern, with more than a billion people affected by obesity and many more overweight. Although various environmental, biological, and behavioral factors have been implicated in obesity, few consistently effective treatments exist for the disease. Recently, however, new weight-loss ...
Compensation for damages can and should address social and cultural impacts
2023-08-03
In this Policy Forum, Robin Gregory and colleagues highlight how a suite of methodological approaches can be used to bring less tangible social and cultural losses that marginalized groups incur into the formal compensation assessment framework. “Though the issues and approaches we describe are applicable in many contexts,” the authors write, “we illustrate them … with a focus on Indigenous communities, for whom the neglect of social and cultural losses in assessments of compensation ...
Adult tropical trees of the same species grow farther apart than factors like seed dispersal limits can explain
2023-08-03
Tropical trees distance themselves from members of their own species more than they do other species, a new study shows. What’s more, trees of the same species exist at distances farther apart than would be expected by chance or the limits of seed dispersal. The results reveal pervasive within-species spatial repulsion in adult trees, providing new insights into the ecological dynamics that stabilize species diversity and enable the exceptionally high diversity of tropical forests. Tropical forests host an unusually high diversity of tree species. For example, some tropical forests contain more than 250 tree species per hectare. However, how hundreds of species coexist on relatively small ...
A gut hormone for controlling appetite doubles as an immune regulator for the fungal microbiome
2023-08-03
Peptide YY (PYY), a hormone produced by gut endocrine cells that was already known to control appetite, also plays an important role in maintaining the balance of fungi in the digestive system of mammals, according to new research from the University of Chicago.
In a study published this week in Science, researchers found that specialized immune cells in the small intestine called Paneth cells express a form of PYY that prevents the fungus Candida albicans from turning into its more virulent form. PYY was already known to be produced by endocrine cells in the gut as a hormone that signals satiety, or when an animal has had enough to eat. The new research shows that it also ...
New, simple and accessible method creates potency-increasing structure in drugs
2023-08-03
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Chemical structures called cyclopropanes can increase the potency and fine-tune the properties of many drugs, but traditional methods to create this structure only work with certain molecules and require highly reactive—potentially explosive—ingredients. Now, a team of researchers from Penn State has identified and demonstrated a safe, efficient and practical way to create cyclopropanes on a wide variety of molecules using a previously undescribed chemical process. With additional development, the new method—described ...
Study finds a surprising new role for a major immune regulator
2023-08-03
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- A signaling protein known as STING is a critical player in the human immune system, detecting signs of danger within cells and then activating a variety of defense mechanisms.
STING is primarily on the lookout for DNA, which can indicate either a foreign invader such as a virus or damage to the host tissue or cell. When STING detects that danger signal, it can turn on at least three different pathways — one leading to interferon production, one to non-canonical autophagy (involved in recycling cell components and clearing pathogens), and a third to formation of the inflammasome, a complex of proteins that activates ...