About 1,650,000 deaths linked to sodium.

• Position: Cardiovascular Disease

More than 1,600,000 cardiovascular-related deaths per year can be attributed to sodium consumption above the World Health Organization's recommendation of two grams per day, researchers have found in an analysis evaluating populations across 187 countries.

"High sodium intake is known to increase blood pressure, a major risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, including heart disease and stroke," says first author Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, Medford, Mass., who led the research while at the Harvard School of Public Health. "However, the effects of excess sodium intake on cardiovascular diseases globally by age, sex, and nation had not been well established."

The researchers collected and analyzed existing data from 205 surveys of sodium intake in countries representing nearly three-quarters of the world's adult population, in combination with other global nutrition data, to calculate sodium intakes worldwide. Effects of sodium on blood pressure and of blood pressure on cardiovascular diseases were determined separately in new pooled meta-analyses, including differences by age and race. These findings were combined with current rates of cardiovascular diseases around the world to estimate the numbers of cardiovascular deaths attributable to sodium consumption above two grams...