CORONARY HEART DISEASE: INTERPLAY BETWEEN CHANGING CONCEPTS OF AETIOLOGY, RISK DISTRIBUTION, AND SOCIAL STRATEGIES FOR PREVENTION

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Abstract
Epidemic diseases move in grand cycles, accompanying changes in culture, social organization, and environment. Coronary heart disease (CHD), a mass disease of twentieth century industrialized society, has a predominantly environmental aetiology. Although the major biomedical risk factors appear to have been identified over the past 40 years of epidemiological research, we are not certain why CHD is now on the wane in most Western nations. In Australia, CHD death rates have, since 1968, declined much more in professional and white-collar men than in blue-collar men. Any substantial reduction in CHD rates will require a generalized population shift towards a lower CHD risk profile. Numerically, the greatest gains should come from reducing the CHD risk of the bulk of the population, who are currently at medium risk of CHD. Notions of risk need, in the first instance, to be based on up-to-date knowledge of biomedical risk factors and mechanisms in order to develop optimal intervention strategies. A population-based strategy can be achieved via community education and structural modification of the social environment. The latter approach will require public health research into broader questions of the social-environmental influences on population cardiovascular health: for example, research into the social, political, and economic determinants of national food and nutrition policies; and into the various environmental (including workplace) changes that will facilitate risk-lowering behaviour. Hopefully, intervention strategies in such areas, set within a community development context, will be developed within the incipient National Program for Better Health.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)