What’s killing you? Find out the CDC’s answers to that question (2024)

What’s killing most Americans? Heart disease and cancer.

In fact, heart disease and cancer still top the list according to a new report that revealed the top 10 causes of death from 2019 to 2023. The list also shows the impact COVID has made since 2020.

The report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) stems from data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and includes other changes in the cause-of-death rankings. There are also five huge takeaways from this report.

One interesting thing to consider is heart disease and cancer are still the leading causes of death and when it comes to heart disease, it’s been the No. 1 cause of death in the U.S., and it’s been that way for decades.

Though heart disease and cancer have declined since 2009, the fact is more than 650,000 Americans have died of cardiovascular disease in each of the past five years. Meanwhile, more than 613,000 people died from cancer last year alone.

According to Dr. Asaf Bitton, an associate professor of medicine and health care policy at Harvard Medical School, heart disease and cancer remain “really common,” also adding to Yahoo Life that, “heart disease and cancer really kill the most people.”

Another interesting tidbit is that COVID is killing fewer people. Even though it was devastating in 2020, where COVID killed more than a million people in the U.S., since then, the fatality rate has fallen.

“When COVID arrived on the scene [in 2020], it became the third-leading cause of death, which was shocking on its own,”Jodie Guest, senior vice chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, told Yahoo Life.

In fact, according to Farida Ahmad, study co-author and lead mortality surveillance researcher at the CDC’s Division of Vital Statistics told Yahoo Life, COVID was such a force that it “really shook up the leading causes of death.”

But by last year, COVID had fallen to the last spot in the top 10 causes of death. It’s all due to the fact that almost all Americans have antibodies from vaccination, before infection or both, according to Guest.

This might not come as a huge surprise but deaths from drug overdoses and alcohol are on the rise.

Even though the new report didn’t address drug overdoses directly, unintentional injuries that included overdoses were the third-leading cause of death every year up until COVID came into the picture in 2020 and 2021.

“It’s scary to see the death rate [from unintentional injuries] increasing by 26%” from 2019 to 2023, “especially when that increase could be due mostly to overdose deaths,” Guest said. “That’s a really horrifying trend.”

Also to keep in mind, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis were the 11th leading cause of death in 2019 but have landed at No. 9 by 2023, with the mortality rate rising by 15% in that span of time.

Another item to consider in the new study is the fact that deaths by suicide have fallen out of the top 10 leading causes of death by 2023.

“It’s great to see suicide dropping down, and we believe it will stay below the 10th position,” Guest said, but also mentioned the possibility of some deaths by suicide being recorded as overdoses.

Experts also say that while suicide fell in the rankings, the rate of deaths by suicide hasn’t. Keep in mind that 14.1 out of every 100,000 people died by suicide in 2023, which is up from 13.9 in 2019.

Still, to Bitton, it’s an encouraging finding.

“If one were to look at it optimistically, following the clear behavioral and mental crisis of 2020 and 2021, in terms of the astounding number of people feeling depressed and seeking care, [the data suggests] that did not translate to a huge shift in suicide, which is good,” he said. “But there has been a bump up.”

Finally, when it comes to heart disease and cancer, the American Heart Association suggests most heart disease and stroke deaths are preventable. Meanwhile, recent research from the American Cancer Society estimates that nearly half of all cancer death are because of changeable lifestyle factors.

In fact, research suggests that healthy lifestyles reduce the risks of dying from any cause.

“If we can help a person do [several] things — not smoke, exercise, not drink too much alcohol, control their weight and blood pressure, get some cancer screenings on a regular basis — we’re well on our way to increasing life expectancy by like a decade,” Bitton said.

“None of those things are easy to do, but that’s the stuff that matters most if what you’re after is living a longer and functional life,” Bitton added.