Report: Heart failure death rate climbs, perhaps as a result of pandemic 

Reports on heart failure mortality during the past several years show that it’s on the rise more recently compared to declines, but a research letter released Wednesday in JAMA Cardiology blames the pandemic for the increase.

The decline in heart failure-related deaths in the United States from 1999 to 2012 didn’t persist, as the trend reversed and went up from 2012 to 2021, recent reports have revealed. In fact, mortality rates from heart failure are higher than in 1999, according to the new letter, which analyzed recent data on heart failure death rates that was published in 2017, 2020 and 2022.

“The origins of these reversals preceded the COVID-19 pandemic, although the larger increases in 2020 to 2021 indicate that the pandemic may have accelerated them due to limitations to healthcare access and possible cardiac involvement,” the authors wrote. Ahmed Sayed, a researcher from Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, was the lead author.

In the 2022 report, for example, an assessment of data from 61,729 deaths related to heart failure were in young adults between 1999 and 2019. During that time, the overall age-adjusted mortality rate per 100,000 persons went up from 2.36 in 1999 to 3.16 in 2019. The same study found that Black adults had a threefold higher mortality rate compared with white adults. Authors of the report called out a high burden of death from heart failure in younger people. 

There are a few factors that may limit the data from the recent reports, the authors wrote. Some deaths may be misattributed, especially in cases where symptoms of heart failure were similar to that of COVID-19. Researchers may not have been able to properly separate data on race and ethnicity in a more detailed way, the authors added.

Also, changes in diagnostic methods, coding patterns and longer survival for patients with conditions that predispose them to heart failure (such as ischemic heart disease), could lead to a higher prevalence of heart failure and therefore increase the death rate attributed to it, the authors noted.