UK’s death toll from lung disease is worst in the Western world

Sweating in saunas ‘cuts the risk of heart disease’

LUNG disease kills more people in the UK than in anywhere else in western Europe, north America and Australia, doctors revealed yesterday.

Nearly twice as many women and nearly a third more men die from respiratory illnesses than those in similar developed countries.

And pollution could be a cause, according to an international research team that included Oxford University and Imperial College London.

Their analysis of World Health Organisation stats showed UK death rates higher for all respiratory conditions except lung cancer.

Between 1985 and 2015, deaths fell from 151 to 89 per 100,000 men and rose from 67 to 68 per 100,000 women.

But in the other countries, deaths fell from 108 to 69 per 100,000 men and rose from 35 to 37 per 100,000 women.

Causes included flu, pneumonia, TB, asthma and bronchiectasis, where the airways of the lungs become abnormally widened.

While smoking has declined since the 1970s, researchers suggested it has a lingering effect along with high air pollution in the UK.

And more women are lighting up, which could explain the increase in female deaths from lung infections.

Poorly

Dr Justin Salciccioli, of Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, said: “Previous analysis comparing UK mortality with western Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia has shown that the UK ranked poorly for respiratory disease.

“When years of life lost were estimated, the UK ranked 17th of 19 for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and 18th of 19 for lower respiratory tract infections.”

Experts had partly blamed the “legacy of high tobacco use compared with other countries”.

He said: “However, this trend has been on the decrease in the 1970s and, despite improvements in reducing tobacco consumption in the UK, we found comparatively high mortality rates persist even in 2015.

“Pollution could be another factor contributing to the higher respiratory disease mortality.”

He noted the UK has a higher death rate attributable to household and ambient air pollution than most of the other countries.

Dr Salciccioli added: “Whether increased respiratory disease mortality in the UK is attributable to smoking, pollution, other environmental factors, or to the delivery of healthcare, requires further evaluation and validation with an independent dataset. The overall trend of respiratory disease mortality in the UK and EU15+ countries is continuing to decrease, but there remains a persistent difference between the UK and other EU15+ countries. The difference in REGULARLY sweating it out in a sauna may be linked to a reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the over-50s, a long-term study suggests.

The lower risks for men and women associated with the amount of time spent bathing, as well as frequency of use, may be because sauna conditions mimic the effects of mild physical exercise, researchers said.

The study, published in the BMC Medicine journal, investigated the links between the traditional Finnish pastime and CVD, one of the main causes of death in the UK.

Researchers studied the sauna habits of 1,688 over50s in Finland and followed up on their health after roughly 15 years.

Those having a sauna four to seven times a week were significantly less likely to die during the period of the study. mortality between the UK and other similar countries does not exist for other chronic medical conditions such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, or death from renal disease.”

The study, published in the British In comparison, those using a sauna once a week had a slightly higher risk of death.

Professor Jari Laukkanen, a researcher at the University of Eastern Finland, said: “An important finding is that more regular sauna use is associated with a lower risk of death from CVD in middleaged to elderly women as well as in men.

“There are several reasons why sauna use may decrease the risk of death due to CVD.

“Our team has shown in previous studies that high sauna use is associated with lower blood pressure.

“Sauna use is known to trigger an increase in heart rate equal to that seen in low to moderate intensity physical exercise.”

Researchers stressed their findings were from one region and further study would be needed to generalise across all populations. Medical Journal, compared death rates in the UK to those in the US, Canada, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. THOUSANDS of female heart-attack victims are putting their lives at risk by missing out on lifesaving aftercare, according to figures from the British Heart Foundation.

Just 43 per cent of women eligible for cardiac rehabilitation take it up, compared with 52 per cent of men, the charity says.

Professor Patrick Doherty, lead author for the charity’s National Audit of Cardiac Rehabilitation, said: “These figures should be of concern to all heart patients, regardless of gender.

Crucial

“Cardiac rehabilitation can be the difference between life and death.

“It could be the difference between your wife, mother, sister or daughter living a fulfilled life or struggling from the after-effects of a heart attack.”

Meanwhile, a US study yesterday found that midlife is a crucial time for women to get fit, eat more healthily and stop smoking to get their heart into shape.

A woman’s risk of cardiovascular disease increases steeply during and after the menopause as blood pressure increases, along with levels of bad cholesterol.

The study involved 1,143 women who were aged between 42 and 52 in 1996.

The results were published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.