Nine of 10 American adults are in the early, middle or late stages of a syndrome that leads to heart disease, a new report finds, and almost 10% have the disease already. "Poor cardiovascular, kidney, and metabolic health is widespread among the U.S.
population," concludes a team led by Dr. Muthiah Vaduganathan of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. Researchers looked specifically at rates of what the American Heart Association has dubbed cardiovascular, kidney and metabolic (CKM) syndrome—interrelated factors that progress with time and, if left unchecked, lead to heart disease .
CKM syndrome is divided into four stages: To find out how many Americans might fall into one of these four categories, the Boston team tracked U.S. federal health survey data for 2011 through 2020.
Among adults age 20 or older, only 10.6% did not have some level of CKM syndrome, the researchers reported May 8 in the Journal of the American Medical Association . About 26% fell into the early stage 1 category, meaning they were gaining dangerous levels of body fat.
Nearly half (49%) of adults fell into stage 2 CVM syndrome, and 5.4% were stage 3. According to the study, 9.
2% of adults were in stage 4, with full-blown heart disease and, in some cases, failed kidneys. All of these numbers were roughly unchanged throughout the nine-year study period. Not surprisingly, the severity of CKM syndrome rose with age: 55.
3% of people 65 or older were in an advanced stage of CKM .
