TUESDAY, Nov. 3, 2026 (HealthDay News) -- While on-duty fatalities among firefighters decreased from 1999 to 2019, cardiac causes account for an increasing share of on-duty mortality, according to a study published online Oct. 21 in JACC: Advances.
Sandy Y. Joung, from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and colleagues examined temporal trends in duty-related cardiac death among U.S. firefighters. The analysis included 3,401 U.S. Fire Administration on-duty fatalities from 1990 through 2025.
The researchers found that 43 percent of deaths were attributed to cardiac causes. Among the 2,097 deaths identified from 1999 through 2019, total firefighter deaths decreased, but the odds that an on-duty fatality was cardiac increased by 2.2 percent per year. There was no significant temporal trend seen among volunteer firefighters (1,224 individuals; odds ratio [OR], 1.01; 95 percent confidence interval [CI], 0.99 to 1.03; P = 0.4), while among career firefighters (873 individuals) there was an increase in on-duty fatality of 3.7 percent per year through 2019 (OR, 1.037; 95 percent CI, 1.01 to 1.06; P = 0.002), but the difference in trends between career and volunteer firefighters did not reach statistical significance. For the general U.S. population, cardiac deaths as a proportion of all deaths declined during the same period (OR, 0.99; −1.3 percent per year).
"Our research shows there may be a blind spot when it comes to routine heart screenings for firefighters in the U.S.," senior author Alan Kwan, M.D., also from Cedars-Sinai, said in a statement. "Identifying heart conditions when they can be treated is key to addressing these new findings."
