[tflinton]

I’m fairly confused by some comments here claiming Covid or vaccines were the cause as the article clearly points out the uptick in deaths started in 2012.

I tend to think it might be the uptick in use of amphetamines. Millineials and late genx were the first to use them in wide scale with a 2.5 increase and a second derivative maxima in 2012, the same time heart failures began dramatically increasing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6261411/

[thorum]

The increase from 2019-2021 (+2 years) was higher than the increase from 2012-2019 (+7 years). I wouldn't want to make any specific claims about the cause, but clearly the pandemic or the response to the pandemic was involved somehow.

[tflinton]

Not necessarily. The CDC reported a sharp increase of stimulant prescriptions at the same time. Adjusted for population it’s not as dramatic as 2012 but still. Amphetamines are incredibly dangerous and cause heart failure and were being prescribed at an alarming rate until the last year.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7213a1.htm

[heyoni]

Amphetamine usage steadily increased over decades while heart failure rates were decreasing. The article itself suggests that maybe opioid overdoses are being marked as heart failure rather than cardiac arrest which would make way more sense considering how relatively rare amphetamine overdoses are.