NBC NEWS – Nearly 90% of adults over age 20 in the United States are at risk of developing heart disease, an alarming new study suggests.
While the unexpectedly high number doesn’t mean that the majority of adults in the U.S. have full-blown heart disease, it does indicate that many are at risk of developing the condition, even younger people.
Researchers identified people at high risk using a recently defined syndrome that takes into account the strong links between heart disease, obesity, diabetes and kidney disease, according to the research published Wednesday in JAMA.
The American Heart Association alerted doctors in October about cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic (CKM) syndrome, a condition which affects major organs in the body, including the brain, heart, liver and kidneys.
CKM is diagnosed in stages ranging from zero — no risk factors for heart disease — to 4 — people with diagnosed heart disease plus excess body fat, metabolic risk factors such as hypertension and diabetes, or kidney disease.
For the new study, researchers analyzed almost a decade’s worth of data from more than 10,000 people who were participating in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
“We absolutely were surprised that almost 90% of people met the criteria,” said study co-author Dr. Rahul Aggarwal, a cardiology fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, in Boston. “It was much higher than we anticipated in a database that included younger adults.”
Especially concerning was the finding that almost 50% of the NHANES participants were at stage 2 of CKM, meaning that they were at moderate risk because they had either high blood sugar, hypertension, high cholesterol or chronic kidney disease, Aggarwal said.
Just more than a quarter of the group — people listed as stage 1 — were at increased risk of developing heart disease because of being obese or overweight, having excess belly fat and fat around their organs, but didn’t have specific symptoms.
The researchers found that 15% of the participants had advanced disease, a number that remained fairly constant between 2011 and 2020.
“I think one of the biggest factors contributing to the fact that the percentage of people in advanced stages is not improving is obesity, which is very prevalent in the U.S.,” …
