Eating too much salt contributed to 2.3 million deaths from heart attacks, strokes and other heart-related diseases throughout the world in 2010, representing 15 percent of all deaths due to these causes, according to a research finding presented Thursday at the American Heart Association's scientific sessions.

The researchers analyzed 247 surveys of adult sodium intake, stratified by age, gender, region and country between 1990 and 2010 as part of the 2010 Global Burden of Diseases Study, an international collaborative study by 488 scientists from 303 institutions in 50 countries around the world.

Next, they determined how the amount of sodium people were consuming was affecting their risk of cardiovascular disease, by performing a meta-analysis of 107 randomized, prospective trials that measured how sodium affects blood pressure, and a meta- analysis of how these differences in blood pressure relate to the risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease includes all diseases of the heart and blood vessels, including stroke.

The researchers estimate that consuming too much sodium led to 2.3 million heart-related deaths worldwide in 2010. Nearly 1 million of these deaths -- 40 percent of the total -- were premature, occurring in people 69 years of age and younger. Sixty percent of the deaths occurred in men and 40 percent were in women. Heart attacks caused 42 percent of the deaths and strokes 41 percent. The remainder resulted from other types of cardiovascular disease. Eighty-four percent of these deaths due to eating too much sodium were in low and middle-income countries, rather than high-income countries.

"National and global public health measures, such as comprehensive sodium reduction programs, could potentially save millions of lives," said Dariush Mozaffarian, lead author of the study and associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

The American Heart Association recommends limiting sodium in diet to no more than 1,500 mg a day.