In the UK, about 200,000 people pass away from CVD every year, with CHD accounting for almost fifty per cent of these deaths. CVD is the cause of about 22% of early deaths in women and 30% of fatalities in men under 75. Numerous studies have been conducted on the epidemiology of Cardiac conditions like CHD, and risk factors are now well understood. Individuals are not guaranteed to be free from CHD if they have one or more significant risk factors, and some people with multiple major risk factors appear paradoxically healthy.
However, there may be proof that in industrialised nations, public awareness of the key risk factors has resulted in changes in social behaviours, particularly with regard to a drop in smoking and fat consumption, which has helped to reduce the number of deaths from cardiovascular disease. Since the late 1970s, there has been a consistent decrease in CHD mortality in the UK of roughly 4.5% a year.
According to a recent study (Unal et al., 2004), this decrease has been made possible by improving the treatment and reducing the main risk factors. This decline is significant, but it has not been as rapid as in nations like Finland and Australia. During the same period, CHD death rates significantly rose in Eastern European countries. However, the less fortunate social classes continue to experience practically unaltered rates of CHD fatalities. The improvement in CHD death rates has primarily been among those with greater earnings.
Although cardiac mortality has decreased due to better care, CHD still caused over 94,000 deaths in the UK in 2006, including 70% of sudden natural deaths, 22% of male deaths, and 16% of female deaths. The primary cause of adult death in most affluent nations is coronary heart disease (CHD); however, in the UK, cancer is only second due to the ineffectiveness of lung cancer treatments. South Asians in the UK had a 45–50% higher death rate from CHD compared to Caucasians, while Caribbean and West African populations have a 35–50% lower death rate.
Prevalence
Adults in the UK had symptomatic CHD in 3.5% of cases. Men between 50 and 59 make up one-third of those with CHD symptoms, and this percentage rises with age. About 1.3 million people in the UK have survived a myocardial infarction, and about 2 million people have had angina or had in the past, which works out to about 5% of men and 3% of women. Annually, 260,000 people experience a myocardial infarction, and 40–50% pass away. The cumulative effect of risk factors that cause atheroma and thrombosis and, ultimately, coronary artery disease (CAD) is what causes mortality to rise with age, which is most likely not caused by a specific age-related factor.
Although the number of CHD deaths overall has decreased by only 10% in the USA over the past ten years due to population aging, age-related death rates for CHD have decreased by 25% over that same period. Like the US, the UK has declining death rates but rising CHD prevalence. Women seem less prone to CHD than men, while this defence seems to wear off after menopause, likely due to hormonal fluctuations. Since the frequency of CHD seems to depend considerably more significantly on geography and lifestyle than on ethnic origin or place of birth, ethnicity has not proven to be a distinct risk factor.
Lower social or economic status has been linked with greater rates of obesity, worse cholesterol readings, higher blood pressure, and higher levels of the inflammatory marker C-reactive protein (CRP).
