Progress on heart disease 'at risk after Tory NHS failures'

Decades of progress in tackling heart disease and strokes is in danger of unravelling in part because of NHS failures under the last government, a report into the state of the health service in England will argue.

- Peter Walker

The statistics on cardiovascular disease from the report by the eminent surgeon and Labour peer Ara Darzi have been released by the health department before its launch on Thursday .

Ministers hope to highlight what they see as the scale of their task with regard to the treatment of heart disease and strokes on the NHS, and to stress the importance of prevent ive measures to ease pressures on the service.

Lord Darzi concludes in his report that while the age-adjusted mortality rate for cardiovascular disease (CVD) dropped significantly for people under 75 from 2001 to 2010, “improvements have stalled since then and the mortality rate started rising again  during the Covid-19 pandemic”.

A submission to the inquiry by the British Heart Foundation made a similar point: “We are extremely concerned that the signifi cant progress made on heart disease and circulatory diseases in the last 50 years is beginning to reverse. The number of people dying before the age of 75 in England from CVD has risen to the highest level in 14 years.”