LONDON: The number of people dying from cardiovascular disease (CVD) in Asia is increasing rapidly, with over half of all CVD deaths globally in 2019 occurring in Asian countries, according to a state-of-the-art review paper published in the inaugural issue of JACC: Asia, foreign media reported.
The data demonstrates an urgent need to understand the burdens and epidemiological features of CVD in Asian countries to develop localized CVD prevention strategies to combat the epidemic. From 1990 to 2019, the number of CVD deaths in Asia rose from 5.6 million to 10.8 million. Nearly 39% of these CVD deaths were premature, meaning they occurred in a person less than 70 years old, which was significantly higher than premature CVD deaths in the U.S. (23%). Most CVD deaths were due to ischemic heart disease (IHD) or stroke. According to the researchers, increasing CVD epidemics in Asia are due to demographic changes, socioeconomics, living environments, lifestyles, prevalence of CVD risk factors and capacities to prevent and treat CVD.
“Timely information on the burdens and epidemiological features of CVD in Asian countries is crucial to understanding the challenges and orienting the development of reasonable policies strategies and actions to combat the CVD epidemic,” said Dong Zhao, MD, PhD, professor of preventive cardiology at the Beijing Institute of Heart, Lung and Blood Vessel Diseases at Beijing Anzhen Hospital, Capital Medical University, and a deputy editor of JACC: Asia.
From 1990-2019, the proportion of CVD deaths among total deaths in Asia increased from 23% to 35%, and crude CVD mortality rates grew in both men and women. The rising crude CVD mortality rates indicate the increasing burden of CVD in Asian populations.
There were significant geographic differences in crude CVD mortality rates among Asian countries in 2019. The highest CVD mortality rate in Asia was in Georgia (810.7 per 100,000 population) and the lowest was in Qatar (39.1 per 100,000 population), representing a 20-fold difference.
Most Asian countries are in the second stage of the rapidly increasing CVD epidemic. In these countries like China, CVD mortality rates are relatively high, with the proportion of CVD deaths among total deaths generally greater than 40%. Characteristics of CVD epidemics in high-income or developed countries feature the third stage of the epidemiological transition, with lower proportions of CVD deaths. In Japan and South Korea, the proportions of CVD deaths among total deaths decreased from 34.9% and 36.2% in 1990, to 26.6% and 24.3% in 2019, respectively.
