Moving the Needle on Cardiovascular Disease, with Seth Martin, MD, MHS

Despite decades of progress and innovation in cardiovascular care, recent data from the American Heart Association (AHA) suggest that the momentum has stalled—and in some cases, reversed.

In his presentation at the 9th Annual Heart in Diabetes Conference, Seth Martin, MD, MHS, a professor of medicine in the division of cardiology at Johns Hopkins Hospital and co-founder at Corrie Health, offered a data-driven overview of the current state of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the United States and globally, based on the AHA’s 2024 statistical update. Framing the atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) session, he presented key trends and calls for urgent action to improve implementation of prevention and treatment strategies at scale.

In an interview with HCPLive, Martin describes the latest trends in cardiovascular disease and contributing underlying risk factors, discussing how those serve as a call to action for innovation and in the way that we improve on those numbers. Specifically, he highlights how although CVD mortality declined steadily from 2000 to 2010, both the total number of deaths and age-adjusted death rates have plateaued or worsened since then. As of 2024, the U.S. age-adjusted cardiovascular death rate is 224.3 per 100,000—virtually unchanged from 2012.

“Whether you look at overall counts or the age-adjusted rate, either we've gone up or we're stagnant based on those two different metrics, whereas we really should be going down with all the innovation that we have in cardiovascular care,” Martin explained. “Clearly, we need to find a way for all the treatments that we know work and the prevention strategies that we know work to penetrate at very high levels across the population.”

Underlying this issue are large increases and high prevalence of key cardiovascular risk factors, including obesity, prediabetes, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease.

“There have been periods of reduction in cardiovascular disease deaths, but in the last decade, we have not had the progress that we'd like to see,” Martin said. “It's really a call to action, these statistics that we're seeing, and it's going to take tremendous scale and multidisciplinary teamwork to really move the needle in the right direction.”

Looking ahead, Martin emphasizes the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration and implementation science and their potential role as catalysts for change.

Editors’ note: Martin has relevant disclosures with Amgen, Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals, Chroma, Heartflow, Kaneka, Merck, New Amsterdam, Novartis, Premier, Sanofi, and Verve Therapeutics.

Reference

Martin SS, Aday AW, Almarzooq ZI, et al. 2024 Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics: A Report of US and Global Data From the American Heart Association. Circulation. doi:10.1161/CIR.0000000000001209.