Congratulations! You must be getting good mileage.
I believe the OP was only talking about cardiac arrest, or as the article calls it, “sudden cardiac death”. But cardiovascular disease as a whole would indeed affect a larger age range.
Well I can find this about trends in cardiac arrest. It’s specifically Australia but likely is true for other developed countries like the United States.
Short version the younger group that dies of cardiac arrest has not deceased much and those over 65 die of cardiac arrest much less often than before.
Also this (pdf). Incidence of cardiac arrest has declined over the past 30 years dramatically, in men for out of hospital from 150/100K to about 40/100K, out of hospital women 40 to about 20K/100K (see figure 1). The risk currently peaks from 75 to 84, pretty much the same as for death from all cardiovasvular causes. There are both fixed and modifiable risk factors. Avoiding or treating hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemias, not smoking, avoiding excess alcohol consumption, and engaging in regular exercise lead the list of modifable ones. Eating fatty fish helps too.
Do those things and you might be a lucky one!
I’m guessing the 75-84 year age range is the peak age range for hospital patients, since the 58-62 year age range is the peak age range for sudden cardiac death (and thus not making it to the hospital, since death has already occured).
Whoops, I forgot that hospital patients die from sudden cardiac death too. Nevertheless, cardiac arrest is usually fatal, thus making it a synonym for sudden cardiac death, for the most part. So 58-62 would be the peak age range for cardiac arrest. Indeed, it is in this age group that sudden cardiac death most frequently occurs.
The article is mainly focused on out of hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) so I don’t think so, although it could be that that number was for both groups’ deaths combined, since they did not specify.
I wouldn’t take your about.com article as authoritative.
Yes, I suppose the about.com article is not a reliable source. But that OHCA study may have been limited, because most sources place the peak age range of sudden cardiac death between the late 50s and the early 60s. These sources give the peak age range as 58-62 years:
And this source gives the peak age range as 55-64 years:
Median age would be 60 (or 59).
The article says, “the average age for experiencing sudden cardiac death is between 58 and 62 for men.” This doesn’t mean that most men die of heart attacks at this age, or at any age. For one thing, a lot of men die of other causes. For another, an average of a set of values isn’t necessarily the most common value. Also, the peak of the probability curve may be far below the 50% level. All the statement means is that, if a man in the U.S. is going to die of a heart attack, it’s most likely going to happen between the ages of 58 and 62. One can’t logically conclude from this that the heart is meant to last only sixty years.
The first about.com and the next two are all media articles that seem to be writing from the same news service source about Tim Russert’s death (in fact the CBS article seems to be what the about.com article cites). None of them are an actual primary source.
The next, the book, is actually exactly the point. It cites the 1982 Framingham study for the peak age data. The point is that the numbers have changed dramatically since then. What was true in 1982 is not true now. (The Framingham study counts as a primary source.)
Here’s another primary source, an actual prospective study of the population of Multnomah County, Oregon (population 660,486) from February 1, 2002 to January 31, 2003:
The vast majority were out of hospital.
This is definitely a case of misreading the statistics. Otherwise, given that I’ve never known anyone to die of cardiac arrest at 60, everyone I know is extremely lucky.
None of the studies cited in this thread are necessarily right or wrong, they are just looking at slightly different things. One cannot make any determination from study data without first fully understanding the criteria used to generate the data. The mainstream press is very good at inferring a story that is simply not supported by the data. But, hey, “Typical Age of Cardiac Death is 60!” sells more papers than “Study Says Some People Die at Age 60, Some Don’t!”.
I turned 60 earlier this year. I’ll let you know when I start deteriorating. 
If you’re gonna pick an age to arbitrarily die at, I’m going with Maude of Harold and Maude who offed herself at 80. ISTM that you can live pretty well up to age 80 if you stay active, eat reasonably healthily, and don’t have a family history full of susceptibility to conditions that would make your old age a terrible time. But after 80, it starts being a bit of a crapshoot, no matter how well you took care of yourself up until then.
This is a big mistake. Cardiac arrest is a mechanism of death. It is not a cause of death. That would be like saying that a person died because he stopped breathing, or because his heart stopped beating, or because there’s no electrical activity in his brain. In other words, it’s like saying he died because he died. That wouldn’t make sense.
I’m 68, and have already had my aortic valve replaced and quadruple bypass, two years ago. I consider myself lucky that my problems were discovered early, before they became critical. In fact, my need for bypasses was discovered when I had a heart cath in preparation for my valve replacement.