Six Interesting Facts about the Heart
1. Heart and circulatory diseases cause a quarter of all deaths in the UK, that’s more than 170,000 deaths each year – an average of 480 deaths each day or one every three minutes in the UK⁵.
2. There are around 7.6 million people living with a heart or circulatory disease in the UK: 4 million men and 3.6 million women⁵.
3. Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the most common type of heart disease. It is the most common cause of heart attack and was the single biggest killer of both men and women worldwide in 2019⁵.
4. In the US, heart disease is the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups¹. One person dies every 33 seconds in the United States from cardiovascular disease¹.
5. About 695,000 people in the United States died from heart disease in 2021—that’s 1 in every 5 deaths¹.
6. The most common type of heart disease in the USA is coronary artery disease (CAD), in which the major blood vessels to the heart become narrow or blocked with cholesterol and fatty build-up. CAD affects 18.2 million adults, and shockingly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that every two in ten deaths from CAD happen in people under 65 years old².
