Heart and stroke treatments a burden for UK healthcare

Hospital visits for heart disease and stroke are increasing, according to new figures.

There were 1.69 million hospital visits, including ordinary admissions and day cases, for cardiovascular disease (CVD) in 2013 to 2014 across the UK, which is up from 1.64 million in 2010 to 2011.

The UK death rate for CVD has fallen from around 341,000 deaths in 1979 to 155,000 deaths in 2014 and up to seven million people in the UK are living with cardiovascular disease, according to the British Heart Foundation (BHF) funded research which is to be published in the journal Heart.

The BHF says that better diagnosis and treatments have helped to dramatically cut the number of deaths from heart disease and stroke while an increasing and ageing population may be prompting the higher numbers of hospital visits.

It is also calling for more research to help prevent, diagnose and treat heart disease as the increasing hospital visits for CVD is placing a massive burden on the healthcare system.

The Oxford University researchers, commissioned by the BHF, looked at a range of materials including trends in hospital admissions, prevalence, and treatment data along with mortality and population data from the UK’s national statistics agencies.

The researchers suggested that potentially higher levels of deprivation might help to explain why Scotland had the highest death rates and prevalence of CVD in the UK.

They found that 4.3% of Scotland’s population was living with coronary heart disease, compared with 3.9% of those living in both Wales and Northern Ireland, and 3.3% in England.