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SAN ANTONIO, Mar 02 (Reuters Health) - Sudden cardiac death--a sudden stoppage of the heart--is not just killing basketball players and old folks. In 1996, it killed 3,000 supposedly healthy young adults, an expert from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Thursday.
The findings were presented here at the American Heart Association's 41st Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention.
From 1989 to 1996, the mortality rate from sudden cardiac death increased by 10% in young men, but among young women the increase was 32%, according to the report. In all age groups sudden cardiac death kills 259,000 Americans each year, said co-investigator Dr. George Mensah, chief of cardiovascular health at the CDC.
The researchers note that sudden cardiac death is still relatively rare in the young, and that the rate is still twice as high in men than women.
In an interview with Reuters Health, Mensah said that most of the deaths in the 15 to 34 age group occur among those aged 25 to 34. "In each year, 79% of the deaths occurred in that (age group)," he said.
Additionally, the mortality rate among African Americans was three times higher than the rate in whites, said Dr. Zhi-Jie Zheng of the Cardiovascular Health Branch, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the CDC. Zheng is lead author of the study. He and his colleagues based their findings on data collected from death certificates. He said that during the same period, sudden cardiac death among older populations also increased by about 10%.
Neither Mensah nor Zheng could point to a single cause for the increase but they speculated that "increases in obesity, diabetes and lack of exercise" are probably responsible. Another explanation, they suggest, could be the increased smoking by teens. According to the CDC, the number of high school students who said they regularly smoked cigarettes climbed from 12% of all high school students to 17% during the 1990s.
Zheng said that another factor could be "use of cocaine or other drugs" since such use has been linked to sudden cardiac death. He said, however, that because he analyzed only death certificate data it was impossible to move beyond "speculation as to the causes."
Dr. Ronald M. Krauss, chair of the American Heart Association's council on nutrition, physical activity and metabolism, said in an interview that it is very difficult to "determine the true causes for sudden cardiac death because of its very nature: sudden." However, the new CDC findings suggest that renewed efforts are needed to reduce smoking and obesity, and increase exercise and the consumption of a healthy, low-fat diet among all age groups, he said.
Sudden cardiac death is a type of catchall diagnosis that includes three different types of attacks. Among the youngest victims, sudden cardiac death is most likely caused by cardiomyopathy--an abnormality of the heart muscle itself--or irregular heartbeats called arrhythmias.
As people age, the most common cause are blockages in the arteries known medically as ischemic heart attacks. Mensah said that this type of heart attack accounted for only 15% of the sudden cardiac deaths among the youngest victims but accounted for 42% of the deaths in those aged 25 to 34.
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