Abstract

Abstract: Advances in cardiovascular disease prevention have led to steep reductions in premature vascular mortality and morbidity in many parts of the world and are often hailed as one of the major public health accomplishments of the past half century. In recent years however, this downward trend seems to have reached a plateau or even reversed in several high-income countries. Dr. Conrad will present a series of studies investigating long-term trends in cardiovascular disease epidemiology that aimed to uncover possible reasons underlying recent trends, investigating how different types of cardiovascular disease presentations and different patient groups have impacted the overall population burden, and how these findings may lead us to reflect on our approach to cardiovascular disease prevention. Many of these studies have used electronic health records from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD), a cohort of 22 million individuals that is representative of the UK population in terms of age and sex, to investigate 20-year trends in incidence, risk factors, and case fatality rates across 10 cardiovascular disease presentations.