This transcript has been edited for clarity .
Robert A. Harrington, MD: I’m here in London at the European Society of Cardiology meetings, at theheart.org | Medscape Cardiology booth, using the meetings as an opportunity to meet with colleagues to talk about recent things that they’ve been writing about.
Today I’m joined by a good friend and colleague, Dr. Dhruv Kazi from Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston. Thanks for joining us.
Dhruv S. Kazi, MD, MS: Thank you for having me.
Harrington: Dr. Kazi is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He’s also the associate director of the Smith Center, which is an outcomes research center at the Beth Israel Deaconess. Thanks for joining us.
Kazi: Excited to be here.
Harrington: The topic I think you know that I want to discuss is a really important paper. There are two papers. They’re part of the American Heart Association’s 100th anniversary celebration, if you will. Many of the papers looked back at where science taken us.
With your coauthor, Karen Joynt Maddox, your papers are looking forward. They’re about the burden of cardiovascular disease in 2050. One paper really focused on what I would call the clinical and public health issues. Yours is focused on the economics. Is that a good description?
Kazi: Perfect.
Harrington: Tell us what you, Karen, and the other writers set out to do. What were you asked to do?
Kazi: As you know, the American Heart Association is entering its second century. Part of this was an exercise to say, where will the country be in 2050, which is a long enough time horizon for us to start planning for the future.
We looked back and said, if prior trends remain the same, where will we be in 2050, accounting for changes in demographics, changes in the composition of the population, and knowing that some of the cardiovascular risk factors are getting worse?
Harrington: For me, what was really striking is that, when I first saw the title and read “2050,” I thought, Oh, that’s a long way away. Then as I started reading it, I realized that this is not so far away.
Kazi: Absolutely.
Harrington: If we’re going to make a difference, it might take us 25 years.
Kazi: Especially if we set ourselves ambitious goals, we›re going to have to dig deep. Business-as-usual is not going to get us there.
Harrington: No. What I think has happened is we›ve spent so much time taking care of acute illness. Case fatality rates are fantastic. I was actually making the comment yesterday to a colleague that when I was an intern, the 30-day death rate from acute myocardial infarction was about 20%.
Kazi: Oh, wow.
Harrington: Now it’s 5%. That’s a big difference in a career.
Trends in the Wrong Direction
Kazi: There are fundamental trends. The decline in case fatalities is a really positive development, and I would hope that, going forward, that would continue. Those are risk-adjusted death rates and what is happening is that risk is going up. This is a function of the fact that the US population is aging; 2030 will be the first year that all the baby boomers will be over the age of 65.
By the mid-2030s, we’ll have more adults over the age of 65 than kids. That aging of the population is going to increase risk. The second is — and this is a positive development — we are a more diverse population, but the populations that are minoritized have higher cardiovascular risk, for a variety of reasons.
As the population of Asian Americans increases and doubles, in fact, as the population of Hispanic Americans doubles, we’re going to see an increase in risk related to cardiovascular disease. The third is that, over the past decade, there are some risk factors that are going in the wrong direction.
Harrington: Let’s talk about that because that’s humbling. I’m involved, as you know, with the American Heart Association, as are you. Despite all the work on Life’s Simple 7 and now Life’s Essential 8, we still have some issues.
Kazi: The big ones that come to mind are hypertension, diabetes, and obesity, all of which are trending in the wrong direction. Hypertension, we were gaining traction; and then over the past decade, we’ve slipped again. As you know, national blood pressure control rates have declined in many populations.
Harrington: Rather substantially.
Kazi: Substantially so, which has implications, in particular, for stroke rates in the future and stroke rates in young adults in the future. Obesity is a problem that we have very little control over. We’re already at 40% on average, which means that some populations are already in the 60% range.
Harrington: We also have obesity in kids — the burden, I’ll call it, of obesity. It’s not that you become obese in your thirties or your forties; you›re becoming obese as a teenager or even younger.
Kazi: Exactly. Since the 1990s, obesity in US adults has doubled, but obesity in US children has quadrupled. It’s starting from a lower base, but it’s very much an escalating problem.
Harrington: Diabetes is tightly linked to it but not totally explained.
Kazi: Exactly. The increase in diabetes is largely driven by obesity, but it›s probably also driven by changes in diet and lifestyle that don›t go through obesity.
Harrington: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think I have this figure correctly. It used to be rare that you saw a child with type 2 diabetes or what we call type 2 diabetes.
Kazi: Yeah.
Harrington: Now, the vast majority of kids with diabetes have type 2 diabetes.
Kazi: In the adolescents/young adults age group, most of it is type 2.
Harrington: Diabetes going up, obesity up, hypertension not well controlled, smoking combustible cigarettes way down.
Kazi: Yeah.
Harrington: Cholesterol levels. I was surprised. Cholesterol looked better. You said — because I was at a meeting where somebody asked you — that’s not explained by treatment.
Kazi: No, it’s not, at least going back to the ‘70s, but likely even sooner. I think that can only be attributed to substantial dietary changes. We are consuming less fat and less trans-fat. It’s possible that those collectively are improving our cholesterol levels, possibly at the expense of our glucose levels, because we basically substituted fats in our diet with more carbs at a population level.