Topic
Heart disease
Heart disease has been the leading U.S. cause of death for decades. Age-adjusted rates rose through mid-century, then fell sharply — with recent year-to-year moves still visible in final vital statistics.
The chart below uses NCHS age-adjusted death rates so comparisons over long periods are not dominated simply by an aging population. Values are deaths per 100,000 people on the 2000 U.S. standard population for modern years.
A lower death rate does not mean heart disease disappeared. It means fewer deaths from heart disease relative to a standardized population. Prevention, treatment, coding, and competing causes all sit behind the line.
Heart disease: age-adjusted death rate
Deaths per 100,000 U.S. standard population · Age-adjusted (2000 U.S. standard for modern years)
Breaks to watch: expanding Death Registration Area until 1933; multiple ICD revisions (including ICD-10 in 1999); source segment change after 2018 (Data Briefs). This is not one seamless identically defined series. Latest final year on this page’s series: 2024.
Data table & download
Source: NCHS major-cause historical file (1900–2018); 2019–2024 from NCHS Data Briefs 427, 456, 521, 548
How to read this chart
- Do not read the long line as one uninterrupted, identically defined series. NCHS itself warns that ICD revisions may create discontinuities in cause-of-death trends.
- Geography: for 1900–1932, vital statistics cover the expanding Death Registration Area (not all U.S. states). Beginning 1933, tables are for the United States as a whole (HIST293 / NCHS historical notes).
- ICD revisions (including but not limited to transitions into ICD-7/8/9 and the 1999 ICD-10 transition) can jump rates for coding reasons. A marker is shown at 1933 (national registration) and 1999 (ICD-10). Earlier revision years are called out in the methods text rather than falsely smoothed.
- Age standard: portal metadata states rates after 1998 use the 2000 U.S. standard population; pre-1999 points come from NCHS historical data that HIST293 describes as recalculated to the 2000 standard for selected-cause tables. Still treat century-scale moves as directional NCHS trend indexes.
- Source segments: 1900–2018 from NCHS dataset 6rkc-nb2q; 2019–2024 appended from NCHS Mortality Data Briefs (427/456/521/548) using ICD-10 leading-cause groups and deaths per 100,000 U.S. standard population. Table segment labels keep those sources distinct.
- Cause titles in the historical file are short labels (Heart Disease, Cancer, Stroke, Accidents, Influenza and Pneumonia). Recent brief tables use ICD-10 rankable groups (e.g., Diseases of heart; Malignant neoplasms; Accidents V01–X59, Y85–Y86).
- Influenza and pneumonia recent rates appear only for years published in the extracted leading-cause tables used here (2019–2020). Later years are gaps, not zeros.
- These are population death rates (underlying cause), not disease progression in individual patients, and not incidence or prevalence.