What are the dangers of cardiovascular disease?

Cardiovascular diseases -- primarily coronary heart disease (chest pain and heart attack), peripheral vascular disease, and stroke -- remain the number one cause of death in the United States, together killing nearly as many Americans each year as all other diseases combined. According to the American Heart Association, many Americans have one or more forms of heart or blood vessel disease. Coronary heart disease accounts for almost 500,000 of these deaths each year, with heart attack the leading cause of death in Americans. This year, nearly 1.5 million Americans will have a heart attack, and for about a third of these, sudden death will be the first and only significant symptom of their disease.