title: Contributions of risk factors and medical care to cardiovascular mortality trends.
abstract: Ischaemic heart disease, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) lead to 17.5 million deaths worldwide per year. Taking into account population ageing, CVD death rates are decreasing steadily both in regions with reliable trend data and globally. The declines in high-income countries and some Latin American countries have been ongoing for decades without slowing. These positive trends have broadly coincided with, and benefited from, declines in smoking and physiological risk factors, such as blood pressure and serum cholesterol levels. These declines have also coincided with, and benefited from, improvements in medical care, including primary prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of acute CVDs, as well as post-hospital care, especially in the past 40 years. These variables, however, explain neither why the decline began when it did, nor the similarities and differences in the start time and rate of the decline between countries and sexes. In Russia and some other former Soviet countries, changes in volume and patterns of alcohol consumption have caused sharp rises in CVD mortality since the early 1990s. An important challenge in reaching firm conclusions about the drivers of these remarkable international trends is the paucity of time-trend data on CVD incidence, risk factors throughout the life-course, and clinical care.
authors.affiliation: MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG, UK.
authors.forename: Majid
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ezzati
authors.affiliation: Department of Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Neville House, 75 Francis Street, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
authors.forename: Ziad
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Obermeyer
authors.affiliation: MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG, UK.
authors.forename: Ioanna
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Tzoulaki
authors.affiliation: Department of Medicine, Groote Schuur Hospital and University of Cape Town, J Floor Old Main Building, Observatory, Cape Town 7925, South Africa.
authors.forename: Bongani M
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Mayosi
authors.affiliation: MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG, UK.
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Elliott
authors.affiliation: Department of Non-Communicable Disease Epidemiology, Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Sciences, London School of Hygiene &Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London WC1E 7HT, UK.
authors.forename: David A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Leon
mesh_terms: D002318:Cardiovascular Diseases / Q000401:mortality* / Q000628:therapy*; D014943:Global Health; D006801:Humans; D009026:Mortality / Q000639:trends*; D058996:Quality Improvement; D012307:Risk Factors