Obesity as a factor in cardiac deaths tripled over 20 years

The number of U.S. adults who died of heart disease and whose death record cited obesity as a contributing factor was three times greater in 2020 than in 1999, according to research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

The finding came from analysis of death certificates in a database maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were 281,135 deaths from heart disease linked to obesity in that time range, the researchers said, and the death rate tripled from 2.2 deaths per 100,000 people to 6.6 deaths per 100,000.