Heart Health: We need to break old habits and get moving
West Virginians have known for generations that our state has among the highest rates in the nation of heart disease and other health issues such as obesity and diabetes. New research suggests that cardiac arrest deaths are actually decreasing in most of the rest of the country; but Black and rural communities are not experiencing the same change.

Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and adjusting the statistics for age, researchers found a steady overall drop of more than 40% in the rate of cardiac arrest deaths, from 7.7 deaths per 100,000 people in 1999 to 4.4 in 2020.

But that same research showed Black people were the only minority group that didn’t experience a significant drop in cardiac arrest deaths, averaging 8.7 deaths per 100,000 during the study, with an annual average decrease of just 1.8%. And the cardiac arrest death rate in rural areas (8.1) was more than twice as high as it was in big cities (3.5).

“On a society-wide level, we need to find ways for better training and awareness so we can get rid of these embedded disparities,” said Dr. Muchi Ditah Chobufo, a cardiology fellow at West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown.

He is referring to both the number of people who have gone through bystander CPR training and access and quality of care.

There is another challenge, of course. We’ve got to do a better job taking care of our own health. Eating right, breaking bad habits and exercising more can seem daunting (and expensive — though in the case of using tobacco products, it might save some money). But given the price we’ll pay if we do not make the socio-cultural changes necessary to reverse this trend, there really is no other option.

Sure, there is work to be done on the policy front as well. We’ve learned by now, however, that we can’t count on that. If there’s work to be done — and there is — we’re going to have to do it ourselves.