March 5, 2026
3 min read
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Heart attacks are killing more young people—and more women
A new study finds that heart attack deaths in U.S. hospitals are rising in people aged 54 and below, signaling a shift in cardiovascular issues in younger ages
Paul Campbell/Getty Images
Heart problems are something most people typically associate with aging, but the risk of developing them might be skewing younger than before. A new study reveals more young people in the U.S. who are hospitalized for heart attacks are dying.
The study reports a steady increase in deaths in recent years among U.S. adults aged 54 and younger who had been hospitalized with their first severe heart attack. Rising trends were seen in both men and women, but young women experienced severe heart attacks at higher rates. The findings add to evidence that the demographics that are most prone to heart attacks are starting to shift—stirring a reconsideration that the condition affects only older adults. The findings were published last week in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
“This is not just an old person’s problem,” says Mohan Satish, the study’s lead author and a cardiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. Heart attacks are still more prevalent in older people in the U.S., but the trend in younger individuals poses “an unsettling question,” he says.
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Karen Joynt Maddox, a cardiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the new research, says the new findings show we are no longer making the same gains in reducing cardiovascular mortality. “I think a lot of younger people feel pretty invincible,” she says, “but cardiovascular risk factors don’t particularly care how old you are.”
The researchers analyzed nearly one million hospitalizations from two types of heart attacks—a severe form called ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and a less sudden but serious type called non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI)—between 2011 and 2022 in people who were 18 to 54 years old. STEMI occurs when a blood clot fully blocks an artery that supplies blood to the heart, whereas NSTEMI happens when a clot partially blocks blood flow. In-hospital deaths after a first STEMI in this age group increased 1.2 percent over the study period. Overall, among people who experienced a first STEMI, women had a slightly higher mortality rate (3.1 percent) compared with that of men (2.6 percent).
To dig into what might be driving these increases, the team examined more than a dozen risk factors, including traditionally recognized ones such as high cholesterol and high blood pressure, as well as “nontraditional” ones. The latter encompassed factors such as psychiatric disorders, nontobacco drug use and low income. Three nontraditional risk factors particularly stood out in young people: chronic kidney disease, nontobacco drug use and lower income.
High blood pressure and high cholesterol are still key risk factors in both young and older adults, “but clearly in young adults, we can see that these nontraditional risk factors have an impact,” Satish says.
And nontraditional risk factors might make it harder to treat and prevent traditional ones, worsening health overall, he adds. For instance, if a young person is diagnosed with high blood pressure but also comes from a low socioeconomic background or has an overlapping autoimmune or psychiatric illness, “that might very well complicate how [a clinician would] address that high blood pressure,” Satish explains. “That’s critical—that interplay between nontraditional and traditional risk is ever more important in these younger folks as compared to older adults.”
Women also had a higher proportion of nontraditional risk factors compared with men, which could partially explain the sex differences in death rates. Additionally, as reported in past research, women were less likely to receive in-hospital heart attack procedures, such as operations to fix blockages.
The study only focused on hospital admissions and reports, which limited the scientists’ understanding of recovery outcomes or disease burden after people were released, says Marat Fudim, a cardiologist at Duke Health in North Carolina, who was not involved in the research. “They cannot look at postdischarge death,” he says, “only hospitalized events.”
Nevertheless, Fudim says, the paper lines up with past research—including his own, which has found that heart failure mortality rates are increasing in people under age 45. He adds that the new paper is a “call to action” for the cardiovascular field. Fudim points to the need to focus more on early education about traditional and nontraditional risk factors, as well as to screen people for cardiovascular conditions at younger ages.
“We should all be very concerned when younger individuals are now in a crossfire of cardiovascular disease and bad outcomes to a greater degree than they ever were before,” he says.
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