What is the Most Common Form of Heart Disease in the World?
If you’re studying heart disease, a question you’ll no doubt ask will be: what is the most common form of heart disease? The answer? Coronary heart disease.
As you know, cardiovascular disease is actually a wide, broad family of diseases, an entire category of ailments and conditions. There are many forms of disease of the heart, but the most common, and the most deadly, is coronary disease.
The most serious issue with coronary disease is that, for the billions of dollars spent on surgeries, on equipment and on treatment every year, the majority of it goes to waste. Treatment for the disease almost always involves heavily invasive, major surgery. There is little in the way of heart surgery that can be conducted without a ten inch incision.
Technology is advancing and we may soon see the day when major surgery can be conducted with a tiny incision and telescopic and laser based tools. However, as of present, the fact remains that the treatment for the disease can be as harmful, if not sometimes more so, than the disease itself.
Certainly, as many people die during surgery as from heart failure. If you want the exact numbers, it’s estimated that somewhere around one million people die from coronary heart disease every single year.
Many believe that coronary disease primarily effects men. While it’s true that most of the victims are men, the statistics are not too much different between genders. For men, fifty percent of all deaths are linked to heart failure, while for women, thirty three percent or thereabouts. In other words, neither men nor women are off the hook, so to speak, when it comes to coronary disease.
Age is not the significant deciding factor you might like to believe it to be, either. In fact, around one hundred sixty thousand coronary heart disease related deaths, in the US alone, occur in people between the ages of thirty five and sixty five, with the rest being made up of people outside of this age range, both younger and older. If we assume that, barring disease and unnatural death, the average person might live to 100, then the thirty five to sixty five range is less than one third of the population, and comprising around sixteen percent of all coronary disease related deaths.
While there are several types of heart disease that people suffer from, it generally goes without saying that when it’s being discussed, what is being discussed is coronary disease, which is the most common and the most deadly.
Prevention is really your best bet with coronary disease. Eat well, exercise, drink more water and so on. It may be worth adding some supplements to your diet in order to control your cholesterol levels as, in this day and age, it’s becoming harder and harder to actually keep track of what’s in your food.
