Cardiovascular Disease: Epidemiology

TW Meade, Medical Research Council's Epidemiology and Medical Care Unit, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, London, UK

Published online: June 2001

DOI: 10.1038/npg.els.0002263

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the commonest form of degenerative arterial disease, which also includes stroke and lower-extremity arterial disease. High levels of cholesterol and fibrinogen, raised blood pressure and cigarette smoking are the main risk factors for CHD, and can be avoided to a large extent (entirely in the case of smoking) by lifestyle modifications or pharmacological methods.

Keywords: heart attack; stroke; intermittent claudication; risk factors; prevention

Figure 1. Number of people in the population with different levels of blood pressure, and the relative risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) due to raised blood pressure. Those with high blood pressure are at greatest relative risk, but there are many more people with only moderately raised blood pressure levels, among whom the largest absolute numbers of blood pressure-related cases occur.
Figure 2. Steps towards clinical events: causes pathways pathology disease.
Figure 3. Cholesterol levels and CHD in an overview of a 16-year cohort study of men aged 35–57 years with and without diabetes (Armitage and Collins, 2000).
Figure 4. (a) Diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and CVA in an overview of 45 cohort studies; (b) cholesterol level and CVA in the same studies. The vertical black line shows no effect (relative risk 1.0); squares to the left of this line indicate a lower risk, and those to the right a higher risk. The dotted line shows the overall effect: (a) relative risk 1.87; (b) relative risk 0.98. For individual studies 99% confidence intervals are shown; for the overview result 95% confidence intervals are given (Prospective Studies Collaboration, 1995).
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 References
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 Further Reading
    book Fowkes FGR (ed.) (1991) Epidemiology of Peripheral Vascular Disease. London: Springer.
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    book MacCallum PK and Meade TW (eds) (1999) Baillière's Best Practice and Research: Clinical Haematology – Thrombophilia, vol. 12, no. 3. London: Baillière Tindall.
    book Marmot M and Elliott P (1992) Coronary Heart Disease Epidemiology: From Aetiology to Public Health. Oxford: Oxford Medical Publications.
    book Swales J and de Bono D (1993) Cardiovascular Risk Factors. London: Gower Medical.

Related Sub-Topics:

Biomolecular Interactions | Other Biomolecules: Structure, Function, Metabolism | Lipids: Structure, Function, Metabolism
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Article Title: Cardiovascular Disease: Epidemiology
 
How to Cite close
Meade, TW(Jun 2001) Cardiovascular Disease: Epidemiology. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1038/npg.els.0002263]