Want to keep your heart beating? Resolve to take care of yourself

Good news. The age-adjusted rate for heart failure-related deaths decreased from 2000 to 2012.

The bad news is deaths from heart failure increased from 2012 through 2014, and the rate was higher for African-Americans than for whites and Hispanics.

Numbers like those always get my attention for a couple of reasons: The obvious one is that I'm black, but more importantly, both my mother and oldest sister died from massive heart attacks. One died at 43 and the other at age 59.

I try not to dwell on that, but just days before 2015 drew to a close, I found in my email a report from the National Center for Health Statistics titled “Recent Trends in Heart Failure-related Mortality.”

The aforementioned stats were among the key findings, and this being the start of a new year, it got me to thinking.

New Year, New You. Right?

As New Year’s resolutions go, the focus is generally on self-improvement, education and relationships. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I wondered how many of us give thought to our heart, the one beating in our chests.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men and women in the United States, and yet we don't normally hear much about it until, well, February, American Heart Month.

My email will overflow with story pitches. It always does, which perhaps is why the NCHS report grabbed my attention.

I was curious why the numbers started to tick back up after such a long downward spiral.

Dr. Kelly McCants, a cardiologist at Piedmont Heart, said the short answer is our population is aging.

Historically, heart failure has been recognized as a disease of the elderly, and there is a clear increase in incidence with age.

While the numbers weren’t completely surprising to McCants, he said “we should be cautious drawing long-term epidemiological conclusions based on a two-year trend.”

“With the recent legislation associated with the Affordable Care Act and the shift to electronic health records, our access to data, vigilance and reporting has undergone a dramatic overhaul during this time period,” he said. “Likewise, it’s hard to believe that we are dealing with a sicker group of patients all of a sudden. The more likely scenario is that with 1 in 5 Americans approaching the age of 65 by 2050, we may begin to see a relative increase based on numbers.”

More good news.

Still I wondered about the uptick in African-Americans, especially given all the emphasis on such illnesses.

Racial and ethnic disparities in the epidemiology as it relates to a diagnosis of heart failure have existed for many years, McCants said.

Studies have shown that not only are death rates from heart failure higher among blacks, they often suffer from high blood pressure, diabetes and chronic kidney disease and therefore are sicker when they seek care.

“We submitted a study to The Journal of Cardiac Failure in 2014, highlighting this disparity,” McCants said. “Of the 314 patients analyzed, there was no statistically significant difference between African-American and Caucasian patients in age, sex, presence of a primary cardiologist or insurance at the time of referral. However, African-Americans were more likely to have a higher body mass index, diastolic blood pressure, hypertension, diabetes and heart muscle disease not related to poor coronary artery blood supply. For African-Americans, the most important clinical predictor of developing heart failure is uncontrolled hypertension.”

There are things we all can do to decrease our risk for heart disease.

"If you have hypertension, monitor salt intake, exercise regularly, limit alcohol consumption and take blood pressure medications as prescribed," he said. "As a cardiologist, I can't stress enough the importance of lifestyle changes like smoking cessation and diets high in fiber and low in salt."

Awareness about heart disease is critical because not only is it extremely debilitating to the patients and their families, it affects the entire health care system with more than 1 million hospitalizations annually.