Nobody said that either. We’re better than ever at treating some forms of CVD.
I’m not trying to be an ass here, but I don’t know whether my explanation was poor, or it’s a reading comprehension issue, or you’re just looking for something which isn’t there. So I’m going to try again.
The graph is showing deaths from CVD - that would include the typical atherosclerosis → heart attack → death pathway, but also others like cardiomyopathy, HFpEF etc.
We saw a gradual decrease in CVD deaths (not cases) due to better treatment for acute MI. You have a heart attack, and your chance of surviving the next few months is greatly improved thanks to new therapies. We have reperfusion therapy. We have good drugs for secondary prevention. We have cardiac rehabilitation protocols which work. We have also made some dent in primary prevention due to better awareness and screening of lipids, blood pressure etc. Smoking rates have also been decreased. So there’s a lot of contributing factors for that fall in CVD deaths.
As you can see, deaths were falling, somewhat consistently (though the line for females is honestly pretty flat for 20 years of 1980 to 2000. Then, they seem to turn around in 2010, and people are saying “what happened in 2010?!” However, that’s the wrong question entirely. Heart attacks, strokes etc are very rare in young people - they tend to start to pick up after 40 years old, and CVD is usually a disease which takes a long time to manifest itself. So a better question is, "what happened in who were turning 40 in 2010 (i.e. those born in 1970). For that question, we have a good answer: rampant obesity and metabolic disease. which have got worse.
What we’re seeing now is the millennial generation entering the age at which they start to get sick. And it’s getting even worse because that generation grew up with even worse lifestyles, eating the majority of calories from ultra-processed foods, a huge proportion being insulin resistant. There is childhood obesity, kids with insulin resistance and hypertension in elementary school. That is giving rise to new forms of cardiovascular disease, such as HFpEF which I mentioned earlier.
Also, just bear in mind the Y axis, which is compressed and maybe a bit misleading. At the worst, the deaths (for females) are 510/1000, and the lowest was around 400/1000. It’s a 22% drop. And if you take the lowest (2010) and compare to highest (2020), it’s a 25% increase. So the difference isn’t actually as big as the graph might indicate where it looks like deaths are very low in 2010. CVD has always been the number 1 killer, by far. If you plotted the Y axis with a range of 0 to 600, those trends won’t look anywhere near as dramatic.
It’s certainly possible that it’s a contributing factor. There are hundreds of factors which would influence CVD death rates - screening guidelines, new drugs, drugs coming off patent, patient attitudes and compliance, the economy, social trends (like smoking, drugs etc), global pandemics etc. But again, I wouldn’t be looking at what happened in 2010 that suddenly caused a bunch of deaths. You want to look 20, 30, 40 years earlier.
