Heart Disease By the Numbers

• Approximately two in 10 deaths in Florida are caused by heart disease, making it the No. 1 killer in the state.
• 47,693 Florida adults were hospitalized in 2022 because of a myocardial infarction, or heart attack.
• The same year, 77,200 Floridians were hospitalized for coronary artery disease, which is damage or disease to the major arteries of the heart usually caused by a buildup of plaque in the vessels. More than 444,000 Floridians were hospitalized because of congestive heart failure, which occurs when the heart can’t pump as effectively as it should.
• $32,808 — the average cost in Florida for a coronary angioplasty and stent placement to open a narrowed or blocked artery in the heart. In 2022, the health care data analytics company Arcadia pegged the average cost in the U.S. for a coronary artery bypass graft — an open-heart surgical procedure — at $77,177.

Source: Florida Department of Health; Agency for Health Care Administration; Arcadia

Rural Risks

In 2022, nearly 50,000 Floridians died of heart disease. Holmes County — a small, rural county in the Panhandle — had the highest age-adjusted rate of death from heart disease, and nine of the 10 counties in Florida with the highest rates of death from heart disease were rural. Indeed, adults living in rural America have about a 19% higher risk of developing heart failure than their urban counterparts, according to an observational study by National Institutes of Health and Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers. The study, published in 2023 in JAMA Cardiology, found that Black men living in rural areas had a 34% higher risk of developing heart failure than did their urban counterparts. Limited access to health care, behaviors (such as smoking and not getting enough exercise) and social determinants of health (including income, education and employment status) are among the factors contributing to poorer heart health in rural regions, the American Heart Association says.