The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has published the stats for 2015 and they are grim: The death rate from heart disease rose almost 1 percent, driving up the mortality rate and undoing four decades of declining rates.

The death rate from stroke also rose — 3 percent.

In a report by The Wall Street Journal, the CDC says the rise in obesity and diabetes is partly to blame for the figures, and also for pushing life expectancy down. A person born in the United States in 2015 could expect to live 78.8 years, on average — that’s about 37 days less than someone born in 2014.

There were 2,712,630 deaths in 2015, up from 86,212 in 2014. That's because 8 of the nation's top 10 leading causes of death — heart disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, unintentional injuries, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and kidney disease — proved to be deadlier in 2015.

The CDC reports that cardiovascular disease has been the top killer in the United States for more than a century. However, death rates from heart disease have plummeted about 70 percent since 1969, mostly due to smoking cessation campaigns and breakthroughs in blood pressure and cholesterol-control meds. Researchers report that the decline almost put deaths from heart disease below cancer, as the leading cause of death. That is until 2011, when the trajectory shifted, and rates remained flat. Then, in 2015, death rates rose.

The CDC now says the overall death rate climbed just over 1 percent (1.2 percent) in 2015, the first such increase in the United States since 1999.

Whether 2015 will be the harbinger of an upward trend remains to be seen. “It’s something that we should pay attention to,” said Elizabeth Arias of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, and an author of the report.

Obesity rates, which soared in the 1980s, are mostly to blame for the higher death rate from heart disease, because obesity increases rates of hypertension, diabetes, and other heart-related problems, the researchers said.

According to the CDC, just over 38 percent of adults between ages 20 to 74, and 21 percent of teens, are obese, compared to 15 percent of adults and 6 percent of teens in the early 1970s.