Health security

Uncontrolled high blood pressure is cutting into heart disease progress

An uptick in deaths due to uncontrolled high blood pressure is slowing the progress in the fight against heart disease, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Deaths from heart disease overall have decreased in the past two decades, but the rate of that decline has slowed since 2010, the study found.

In addition to rising rates of deaths related to high blood pressure, rates of heart disease deaths linked to obesity and Type 2 diabetes — once declining — have leveled off.

The findings are worrying, especially given the recent medical and surgical advances in treating heart disease.

"The fact that we are not seeing that translate into improvement in death rates is concerning," study author Dr. Sadiya Khan, a cardiologist at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, said.

Khan and her colleagues searched a public Centers for Disease Control and Prevention database for death certificates from 1999 to 2017.