Heart disease Europe’s main health problem: study

LONDON (Reuters) – Heart disease in all its forms is the
biggest single health problem facing the European Union,
costing the bloc’s 25 members a total of 169 billion euros in
2003, according to a study on Wednesday.

Not only did cardiovascular disease (CVD) on average cost
every EU citizen 230 euros in healthcare, but it led to 268.5
million lost working days, killed two million people and
affected the daily lives of 4.4 million others.

“CVD is the biggest single health problem facing Europe
both in terms of resource burden and economic burden,” said
lead researcher Jose Leal from Oxford University.

Leal said research by a team from the university’s Health
Economics Research Center was the first to assess the economic
impact of all aspects of CVD — primary care, emergency,
medicine, outpatient and inpatient — on all the bloc’s
members.

It noted that some 1.4 million people were involved in
providing unpaid care to sufferers of coronary heart disease
and cerebrovascular disease alone — which together account for
47 percent of costs and two-thirds of deaths.

Leal said the research, published in European Heart
Journal, aimed to highlight in straightforward monetary terms
the scale of the problem facing EU policy makers.

Germany and Britain together accounted for over half the
EU’s total CVD costs — primarily because of their large
populations.

The UK topped the CVD spending league, allocating 17.1
percent of its total healthcare budget to the problem. Germany,
Slokavia, Estonia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Poland all
spent 15 percent.

At the bottom were Ireland at 4.4 and Malta at 2.0 percent.

Leal stressed there was no single cause of the illness and
therefore no single solution, and insisted the figures did not
reflect any suggestion that individual countries were spending
too much or too little on the problem.

“The real use is that it will allow comparisons to be made
within countries and the EU as a whole of the burden imposed by
different diseases,” he said. “This should help potentially to
prioritize scare resources.”