Heart Diseases

Last fortnight the Bureau of the Census published its analysis of the 1,219,019 U. S. deaths that occurred during 1925. For every 100,000 of the population the death rate remained the same, 1,180, as in 1924. But according to diseases, it varied thus:

1925 1924

Heart Diseases 185.5 178.1 Gain

Kidney Diseases 96.3 89.9 Gain

Pneumonia 93.5 98.2 Loss

Cancer 92.6 91.9 Gain

Tuberculosis 86.8 91.9 Loss

Twenty-five years ago this array was otherwise. Tuberculosis then was the chief cause of death. But doctors have taught defense against contaminated surroundings. People have learned to guard themselves. So typhoid, yellow and scarlet fevers, diphtheria, cholera and babies' bowel troubles are no longer pandemic and rarely epidemic in civilized countries. People live, on the average, ten years longer now than they did in 1900.

That is one reason why more people are now dying of heart diseases, kidney diseases and cancer (characteristic maladies of middle age and senescence) than died a generation ago. Formerly people who would have had these ailments died young. But, in the case of heart diseases, the hazard of death has been actually increasing. Louis Israel Dublin of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. stressed this fact in the current Harper's. According to him. out of 100 ways of dying, a boy of ten now has 19 chances of dying eventually from heart diseases; a man of 50 has 22 chances; and one of 70, 24 chances. These figures apply also to girls and women.

Doctors have begun to warn against heart trouble as they did against tuberculosis and more recently against cancer. They talk of heart disease, for the sake of simplicity, as though it were a simple malady. It is not. There is probably no disease that actually starts in the heart. (Cancer of the heart and angina pectoris may be exceptions.) But practically all diseases of the heart are brought to it. Hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure and Bright's disease, cause 40% of heart troubles; rheumatic fever, 25%; syphilis, 10%; various other sicknesses, 15%. In only 10% of the cases are the causes listed as unknown.