Heart disease continues to be the leading cause of death in the United States, with cardiovascular disease claiming more lives than all forms of cancer and accidental deaths combined. According to the American Heart Association (AHA), one person dies from cardiovascular disease every 34 seconds and from stroke about every 3 minutes.
The AHA’s 2025 Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics report highlights increasing rates of hypertension, obesity, and kidney disease as major risk factors for heart disease. In 2022, there were 941,652 heart-related deaths in the US, with the age-adjusted death rate attributable to cardiovascular disease falling slightly.
However, concerns remain about kidney disease, which has seen a rise over the past decade. The prevalence of chronic kidney disease among Medicare beneficiaries increased from 9.2% in 2011 to 14.2% in 2021. Cardiovascular disease and kidney disease are closely interrelated, and risk factors for these diseases are often overlapping.
A significant number of US adults have multiple risk factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, and kidney disease. Nearly half of adults have hypertension, while nearly three-quarters have an unhealthy weight or obesity. Excess weight contributes to thousands of deaths each year in the US and lowers life expectancy by up to 2.4 years.
To address this issue, experts emphasize the need for transformative weight-management therapies and a renewed focus on nutrition. “Now is the time to go all-in on obesity prevention and treatment,” says Dhruv Kazi, MD. The arrival of new treatments and technologies presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix the obesity epidemic and reduce the alarming number of heart disease deaths in the US.
Source: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/heart-disease-still-top-cause-death-2025a100022d?form=fpf