During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people dying from cardiovascular disease jumped in the largest single-year increase since 2015, topping the previous high, recorded in 2003.
The study, published in Circulation on Jan. 25, found cardiovascular disease deaths rose from more than 874,000 in 2019 to more than 928,000 in 2020. The age-adjusted mortality rate also increased for the first time in years, rising by 4.6 percent.
"The age-adjusted mortality rate takes into consideration that the total population may have more older adults from one year to another, in which case you might expect higher rates of death among older people. So even though our total number of deaths have been slowly increasing over the past decade, we have seen a decline each year in our age-adjusted rates — until 2020," Connie Tsao, MD, volunteer chair of the Statistical Update writing group and attending staff cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, said in a Jan. 25 American Heart Association news release.
The largest increases of heart-related deaths were among Asian, Black and Hispanic people, according to the study.