WHO News

Cardiovascular disease can be halved, World Health Report finds

Simple measures could halve the death and disability caused by heart disease and strokes, which currently kill more than 12 million people a year globally. The World Health Report 2002: reducing risks, promoting healthy life, published on 1 November, finds that about 75% of cardiovascular disease can be attributed to the established risks the report examines. This means that a combination of simple steps which governments and individuals can take would make a much greater difference than had been thought.

The major risk factors for cardiovascular disease are high blood pressure, high cholesterol, tobacco use, obesity, physical inactivity and low consumption of fruit and vegetables. Individual lifestyle choices can obviously reduce these risks, a range of common drugs can lower blood pressure, and statins can lower cholesterol. The report estimates that 10-30% of adults in almost all countries suffer from high blood pressure, and a further 50-60% would be in better health if their blood pressure were lower. Combination therapy alone, costing less than US$ 14 per person per year, would halve this risk.

The report also urges countries to adopt policies and programmes which can lower risk levels for the population as a whole, for instance by reducing salt in processed foods, cutting dietary fat, promoting exercise and higher consumption of fruit and vegetables, and discouraging smoking.

This is no longer a problem for rich countries only. The report finds that most of the world's burden of disease caused by cardiovascular risks is now occurring in developing countries. "We are seeing that conditions like high blood pressure and high cholesterol are much more prominent in developing countries than previously thought," says Anthony Rogers, a WHO consultant from the University of Auckland and one of the main authors of the report. "The world once thought of cardiovascular disease as a Western problem, but clearly this is not the case."

The report can be obtained from www.who.int/whr. Thomson Prentice (prenticet@who.int), Managing Editor of the World Health Report, can provide more information about it.