According to U.S. National Vital Statistics records beginning in
1900, CHD was rarely given as the cause of death by physicians
until after 1930. The following graph is from The Great
Cholesterol Con, by Anthony Colpo, which I highly recommend. The
relevant line for CHD deaths begins in the lower left-hand part
of the graph. Other types of heart disease, such as heart
failure due to cardiomyopathy, were fairly common and well
recognized at the time. These data are highly susceptible to
bias because they depend on the physician's perception of the
cause of death, and are not adjusted for the mean age of the
population. In other words, if a diagnosis of CHD wasn't
"popular" in 1920, its prevalence could have been
underestimated. The invention of new technologies such as the
electrocardiogram facilitated diagnosis. Changes in diagnostic
criteria also affected the data; you can see them as
discontinuities in 1948, 1968 and 1979. For these reasons, the
trend above isn't a serious challenge to the idea that CHD has