Coordinating Efforts to Reduce the Global Incidence of Cardiovascular Disease

One third of deaths worldwide are due to cardiovascular diseases. Understanding the extent to which the incidence of cardiovascular disease and risk-factor burden differ across the world is useful to inform local and global health policies, although comparable data from various world regions are sparse. Most reported studies of risk factors for cardiovascular disease have been from high-income, Western countries, with few data from other regions of the world. In this issue of the Journal, Magnussen et al. report the results of a study investigating cardiovascular risk factors and their associated population-attributable fractions of the incidence of cardiovascular disease and . . .