Heart Disease Still Top Cause of Death

Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States, fueled by ongoing increases in hypertension, obesity, and other major risk factors, according to the American Heart Association’s (AHA) 2025 Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics.

Cardiovascular disease, which includes heart disease and stroke, claims more lives in the United States than all forms of cancer and accidental deaths — the number two and number three causes of death — combined. On average, one person dies from cardiovascular disease every 34 seconds and from stroke about every 3 minutes.

“Those are alarming statistics to me — and they should be alarming for all of us — because it’s likely many among those whom we lose will be our friends and loved ones,” AHA President Keith Churchwell, MD, from the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, said in a news release.

Concerns About Kidney Disease

In 2022 — the most recent year for which final US data are available — the overall number of heart-related deaths was 941,652, which is an increase of more than 10,000 over deaths in 2021. However, the age-adjusted death rate attributable to cardiovascular disease fell slightly, from 233.3 to 224.3 per 100,000 in 2022.

Cardiovascular disease–related deaths appear to be leveling off after an increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. Age-adjusted death rates dropped for all but one of the ten leading causes of death: Kidney disease.

Over the past decade, rates of kidney disease have been on the rise. Among Medicare beneficiaries, the prevalence of chronic kidney disease rose from 9.2% in 2011 to 14.2% in 2021. Since 2010, the global prevalence of kidney disease has increased more than 27%.

This is “important” because cardiovascular disease is a major contributor to kidney disease, and risk factors for these diseases are closely interrelated, said Writing Committee Chair Seth Martin, MD, professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

One in three US adults have three or more risk factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, and kidney disease, according to the 260-page AHA report, published online on January 27 in Circulation.

In 2023, the AHA formally defined cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome as a health disorder, citing the strong overlap between heart disease, kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity.

Time to ‘Go All-In’ to Fix the Obesity Epidemic

Nearly 47% of adults have hypertension and 57% have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, according to the latest figures. More than 72% of adults have an unhealthy weight — currently defined as body mass index ≥ 25 — and nearly 42% have obesity defined as body mass index ≥ 30.

Excess weight contributes to as many as 1300 additional deaths per day in the United States (nearly 500,000 each year), according to the AHA, and lowers life expectancy by as much as 2.4 years. The impact on lives lost is twice as high for women as for men, and higher for Black people than for White people.

“It’s alarming to note that excess weight now costs us even more lives than smoking, as smoking rates have actually fallen in recent years. Being overweight is the new smoking when it comes to health threats,” Latha P. Palaniappan, MD, professor of cardiovascular medicine at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who is vice-chair of the writing group, said in the release.

“From a societal perspective, now is the time to go all-in on obesity prevention and treatment. The arrival of transformative weight-management therapies and a renewed focus on nutrition has given us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix the obesity epidemic,” wrote Dhruv Kazi, MD, a cardiologist and health economist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, in an editorial accompanying the 2025 report.