The future of coronary heart disease prevention.

摘要

Coronary heart disease (CHD) causes death or serious disability in about one-third of people in Western societies and is now the leading cause of death worldwide. There are about 120,000 deaths each year in the UK, a rate that has remained constant despite a substantial decline in age-specific mortality over the past 25 years. Smoking cessation and interventions such as aspirin, thrombol-ysis and, more recently, statins and blood pressure (BP) lowering drugs have been largely responsible for this decline, but have only shifted the number of CHD deaths from a younger age group (50-59 years) to an older one, leaving the absolute number of deaths unchanged.