HEART ATTACK AND STROKE

One of every three deaths in the U.S. in 2013 were from heart disease, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases, while heart disease and stroke were the No. 1 and No. 2 killers worldwide, according to the American Heart Association’s 2016 Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics Update published Wednesday.

Produced since 1958, the update is created from the most-recent data available and compiled by the AHA, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other government sources.

“Statistics about cardiovascular disease and stroke, and particularly the metrics about death and the factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease are incredibly important,” said AHA President Mark Creager, M.D., director of the Heart and Vascular Center at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

He said the information helps the AHA track the effectiveness of its efforts.

Despite the progress in reducing the number of deaths from heart disease and stroke, Creager said, the numbers are still too high.

In the U.S. the data showed:

• cardiovascular diseases claimed 801,000 lives;
• heart disease killed more than 370,000 people;
• stroke killed nearly 129,000 people;
• about 116,000 of the 750,000 people in the U.S. who had a heart attack died;
• about 795,000 people had a stroke, the leading preventable cause of disability;
• among African-Americans adults, 48 percent of women and 46 percent of men have some form of cardiovascular disease; and
• African-Americans have nearly twice the risk for a first-ever stroke than whites.

The annual report includes a chapter on Sudden Cardiac Arrest. According to the report, about 326,200 people experienced out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) in the U.S. in 2011. (This compares with a reported incidence of 424,000 in the AHA's Heart and Stroke Statistics--2014 Update.) Of those treated by emergency medical services, 10.6 percent survived. Of the 19,300 bystander-witnessed cases in which individuals had a heart rhythm that could be treated effectively with a defibrillator (ventricular fibrillation-VF or ventricular tachycardia-VT), 31.4 percent survived.