Heart disease remained the leading cause of death in America, according to government data, but demographic and geographic quirks thrust cancer to the top of the list for several subgroups of the USA population and in nearly two dozen states. Since 2000, the other 20 states where cancer has been the leading cause of death include California, Delaware, Arizona, Kansas, Colorado, Idaho, Maine, Kentucky, Nebraska, Massachusetts, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, North Carolina, Hew Hampshire, Wisconsin, Virginia, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia. Health officials in United States have made a considerable progress in eliminating heart disease and likely treated and prevented it more effectively than cancer.
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Cancer surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of death for 22 states in 2014. In 1990, Alaska and Minnesota became the first two states to report more cancer deaths than heart disease-related deaths. The heart disease declined since the early 1990s as the leading cause of death.
The report was published online August 24 in the CDC’s NCHS Data Brief.
“It’s been edging this way for a while”, said co-author Robert Anderson from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
Annual heart disease deaths decreased nationwide from a peak of 771,169 in 1985 to 596,577 in 2011. Cancer deaths went from 210,733 in 1950 to 576,691 in 2011 and 591,699 three years later. That’s because, from 2011 to 2014, heart disease deaths increased slightly more than cancer deaths, keeping heart disease at the top of the rankings overall. Within this group, the number of cancer deaths increased by 72.2% from 2000 to 2014 compared to a 31.8% increase in the number of heart disease deaths. In addition, cancer is now the leading cause of death for a number of minority groups, including Hispanics, Asians and Pacific Islanders. Even so, heart disease deaths among these groups continued to rise during the 2000s, rather than fall as they did among other demographics. Demographers stated that cancer may surpass heart disease in few more years.
Women, in turn, reported a high tendency of dying from heart disease than from cancer.
The results reflected trends noted in prior studies and predicted by models of sociodemographic trends in the US, according to Rebecca Siegel, MPH, of the American Cancer Society. Due to the fact that cancer is more complicated than cardiovascular diseases, it might be more hard, as a result, to treat cancer as effectively as heart diseases.
“One could argue that we’re doing a better job of keeping people with heart disease alive”, said Jessup, who is a professor at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Nevertheless, obesity might be also playing a role in the rise.
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Former studies have revealed that obesity is more likely to cause heart deaths than cancer deaths, however, the condition has been likewise found to be a risk factor to eventually develop cancer.
