Heart Disease Rates Fell 20 Percent Since 1980s

SUNDAY, Nov. 13, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- New research shows that cases of heart disease have dropped 20 percent in the United States in the last four decades. Experts credit the trend to better detection and prevention of risk factors that endanger heart health.

"That means all the efforts are paying off," said senior researcher Michael Pencina. He is director of biostatistics for the Duke Clinical Research Institute at Duke University, in Durham, N.C.

However, most major heart risk factors -- bad cholesterol, high blood pressure and smoking -- remain strong contributors to heart disease, showing that more can be done to protect patients, Pencina added.

"Coronary disease was the size of a large pizza, but now it's a medium pizza," Pencina said. "But in terms of slices, what portion of the pizza you can attribute to the risk factors, it's about the same," he explained.

"There is definitely room for further improvement. We can get maybe to the smaller personal pizza size, to keep to the analogy," he continued. "Because risk factors still matter, intervening in these risk factors should drive further reductions."

About 610,000 people die of heart disease in the United States every year -- about one in every four deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For the study, Pencina and his colleagues created two pools of about 14,000 patients using data drawn from five large studies.

One group included patients from an earlier era, who were recruited to their studies between 1983 and 1990. The other group included more recent patients recruited between 1996 and 2002, with follow-up ending around 2011.

Researchers expected that the more-recent patients would fare better when it comes to heart disease because they had the benefit of better drugs for treating cholesterol and lowering blood pressure, as well as more effective anti-smoking efforts, Pencina said.

That assumption turned out to be correct, with the late-era patients showing about 20 percent fewer cases of heart disease compared to the earlier patients, the researchers reported.