Heart Disease Facts: Burden, Risk Factors, and Disparities

This CDC fact sheet compiles the key US heart disease surveillance statistics from the National Vital Statistics System and NHANES, presenting the disease burden, incidence, and risk factor landscape in a format designed for public communication and reference.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups. The 2023 data document 919,032 cardiovascular deaths — one in every three deaths in the country. Coronary heart disease killed 371,506 people in 2022. Heart disease cost $417.9 billion from 2020 to 2021 in direct care costs and lost productivity.

The incidence cadence is striking. 805,000 Americans have a heart attack each year — someone every 40 seconds. 605,000 are first heart attacks; 200,000 are recurrent. About one in five are silent, with no recognized symptoms — a proportion with direct implications for subclinical CAD detection. The 5% prevalence of diagnosed CAD in adults aged 20 and older almost certainly underestimates true disease burden given the silent event rate.

Risk factors documented in the underlying NHANES data: hypertension, diabetes, obesity, smoking, physical inactivity, and poor diet drive the vast majority of CHD risk. These are modifiable. The CDC fact sheet frames them as preventable causes of preventable deaths — an accurate framing that supports the case for aggressive primary prevention beginning earlier than most standard-of-care approaches would dictate.

The racial and ethnic disparity pattern is consistent with other data sources: non-Hispanic Black Americans bear disproportionate burden across nearly all cardiovascular metrics.

We rate the evidence strong. This CDC fact sheet provides authoritative surveillance-based statistics on US heart disease burden and risk factors — the standard reference for population-level cardiovascular epidemiology in public health communication.