British Heart Foundation says urgent research is needed to target causes of heart attacks
Heart attacks kill more than 3,000 people prematurely1 each year in the North West, new figures from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) have revealed.
The charity estimates that more than 22,000 people under the age of 75 across the UK suffered a fatal heart attack, in 2014.
The figures have been released as the BHF launches a new campaign to highlight how heart conditions, including heart attack, suddenly devastate families across the country on a daily basis.
A heart attack strikes someone every three minutes in the UK, with almost 188,000 heart attacks treated in UK hospitals in 2013/2014.
This figure is up from 175,000 the year before, which the charity says could be due to better diagnosis and recording. Despite improvements in treatment and diagnosis, around a third of heart attacks are fatal.
Although figures remain high, medical research, much of it funded by the BHF, has significantly improved heart attack survival rates through better diagnosis and treatments.
However, the BHF – which funds more than £18million of research in the region – says more research is urgently needed to save more lives and combat the main cause of heart attack – coronary heart disease (CHD).
Around 288,000 people in the North West are living with CHD and it remains the UK’s single biggest killer. Yet we understand remarkably little about atherosclerosis, the process that causes narrowing of the coronary arteries and potentially fatal heart attacks.
Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Through medical research, we’ve made great progress in saving the lives of people suffering from heart attacks. But we mustn’t be lulled into thinking we’ve beaten the disease. Every year thousands of people are still dying from heart attacks, and coronary heart disease remains the UK’s single biggest killer.
“We urgently need to fund more research to find new ways to prevent and treat heart attacks, and ultimately, save more lives. Despite knowing that risk factors, such as smoking, increase the risk of heart attack, we still have no way to stop the furring of the arteries in coronary heart disease that is responsible for causing so many heart attacks. This is a challenge that only research can provide the answer to.”
