Developing world is new frontline in heart disease
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Heart disease, usually seen as a quintessentially Western problem, is rapidly becoming a major threat to the developing world, costing millions of lives and billions of dollars, top cardiologists said on Tuesday.
Worsening diets, lack of exercise and smoking mean heart attacks and strokes are taking a mounting toll on poorer countries, experts told the World Congress of Cardiology.
“They now cause four times as many deaths in mothers in most developing countries than do childbirth and HIV/AIDS combined,” said Professor Stephen Leeder of the University of Sydney.
“Worldwide, HIV/AIDS causes three million deaths a year—cardiovascular disease causes 17.5 million.”
In some developing countries, the risk of dying from heart disease is actually many times higher than in rich countries.
In Brazil, 28 percent of the population dies from a heart attack or stroke before the age of 65—around three times the average in North America and most of Europe.
The emergence of new economic powerhouses in Asia and Latin America is creating societies in which over-eating and malnutrition go side by side, fuelling health problems at both ends of the wealth spectrum.
In China, the World Health Organisation estimates that economic losses due to cardiovascular and other chronic diseases will total $558 billion between 2005 and 2015, while India will lose $236 billion and Russia $303 billion.
Dr Valentin Fuster, president of the World Heart Federation, said the United Nations must take a lead by including heart disease among its health-related Millennium Development Goals.
While the world needed to continue to focus on big infectious killers like AIDS and malaria, the overall approach to healthcare had to be rebalanced, he said.
Many of the measures needed to improve cardiovascular health were simple and low cost, experts argued.
Education programmes on smoking and diet could be highly effective, while a basic drug like aspirin—which has been shown to saves lives—cost only a few cents. Yet many of the world’s poor cannot afford even such basic medication.
Dr Salim Yusuf of Canada’s McMaster University said cardiovascular disease, which was virtually unknown 100 years ago, was an entirely man-made disease.
Recent research shows more than 90 percent of cases are avoidable and a handful of standard factors are responsible across the globe, such cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, poor diet, obesity and lack of exercise.
“We have the treatments for these risk factors, so we should treat them,” Yusuf said.
Governments around the world could easily rank the cost-effectiveness of various prevention measures and implement as many as possible within their budget limits, he added.
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