Last week, ACVP blog's analysis of heart disease as a medical mystery left our readers with a few big questions.

Despite all the research and measurement into heart disease on a national and global scale - are we any closer to satisfying answers about how best to continue to decrease heart disease mortality rates?

The history of the heart disease decline - and all the research that came out of it - still might leave us (surprisingly) lost for hard answers.

Attribution of causes, historically, a murky process

In 2013, medical historians David S. Jones, MD, PhD of Harvard Medical School and Jeremy A. Greene, MD, PhD of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine published a history of the decline of heart disease mortality in the American Journal of Public Health.

Following their peak in the early 1960s, heart disease mortality rates shockingly declined 20 percent between 1968 and 1978---a decline so large and without simple explanation that a conference was called to determine whether the decline was "real." (It was.)

"Quite simply, the problem was that too many things had changed," write Jones and Greene.

Continue reading Medical Mystery Monday: Why is Heart Disease In Decline? Part Two