Heart disease rate in the US on the rise

Heart Disease on the Rise

Heart disease rate in the US on the rise: "Heart disease has been the leading cause of death in the United States for the past 80 years ( 1) and is a major cause of disability. Heart disease also results in substantial health-care expenditures; for example, coronary heart disease is projected to cost an estimated $151.6 billion in direct and indirect costs in 2007 ( 2). Although some self-reported national data are available ( 3), state-specific prevalence data for heart disease have not been reported previously. In addition, although racial/ethnic, geographic, and sex differences in death rates for heart disease have been documented ( 4,5), less information has been available regarding the prevalence of persons living with heart disease. To estimate the prevalence of myocardial infarction (MI) and angina/coronary heart disease (CHD) in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia (DC), Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), CDC analyzed self-reported data from the 2005 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS).* This report summarizes the results of that analysis and provides the first state-based prevalence estimates of these heart diseases."