As with the previous year, heart disease is still the no. 1 killer in America, a new study finds. The dreaded illness is followed by cancer as the second leading cause of death in the United States.

The report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) brings a bit of good news. Researchers found that infant mortality rates decreased by 2.3 percent. In 2014, adult death rates also reduced by 1 percent. Both rates hit a record low.

Top Causes Of Death In America

Based on an analysis of death certificates in 2014, heart disease killed 614,348 Americans. On the other hand, cancer led to 591,699 deaths in the same year. The two conditions were responsible for 45.9 percent of all the deaths in the country that year.

In recent years, heart disease and cancer have been topping America's leading causes of deaths. But in 2014, the two conditions killed more people compared with the statistics in 2013.

"Cancer tends to occur a little bit later, it's a more chronic issue. It kills you later than heart disease does on average. You see this increase in cancer mortality - a lot of it is lung cancer," said Bob Anderson, chief of Mortality Statistics Branch in the CDC.

In particular, cancer remained steady with a 22.5 percent coverage of all deaths in the country. However, the percentage coverage of heart disease varied in the past years and dropped slightly from 23.5 percent in 2013 to 23.4 percent in 2014.

Chronic lower respiratory diseases are the third leading cause of deaths in the United States, followed by accidents and stroke. These three accounted for 15.8 percent of deaths in 2014. Completing the top 10 were Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, pneumonia and influenza, kidney disease and lastly, suicide. The last five accounted for 12 percent of all 2014 deaths in the country.

Life Expectancy

The CDC report also discovered that a person's life expectancy at birth remained unchanged since 2012 - 78.8 years. Hispanic males and females, African-American males, as well as non-Hispanic black males showed increased life expectancy. Unfortunately, the rates for non-Hispanic white females decreased between 2013 and 2014. Two possible causes were suicide and opioid abuse.

"I think, ideally, what we would like to see is people living well into their nineties and even early 100s in relatively good health, and dying as things just kind of wear out," added Anderson.

The report [PDF] is available online via CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.

Photo: Military Health | Flickr