Leading article: Some heartening news

Published: 03 May 2007

Good news on health is in short supply. In one area, however, the Government has claimed unmitigated success: deaths from cardiovascular disease are plummeting. In the past 10 years, deaths from circulatory disease in people under 75 - caused mainly by heart attacks and stroke - have fallen by almost 36 per cent. So precipitous has been the decline that the Government's target of a 40 per cent reduction by 2010 will be met at least two years early.

This translates into an extra 100,000 lives saved from heart disease since 1997. Naturally, ministers have crowed about the achievement - Tony Blair cited it at his valedictory meeting with NHS leaders at the King's Fund on Monday. But how far is the improvement attributable to government intervention?

A study published yesterday shows that it is, in fact, an international phenomenon. Across more than a dozen countries, deaths among patients admitted to hospital with severe heart attacks almost halved in six years - from 8.4 per cent to 4.5 per cent. The University of Edinburgh study was the largest of its kind. It covered 113 hospitals in 14 countries and involved nearly 45,000 patients. The results are testimony to the medical advances of recent years: better techniques and better drugs, more widely prescribed.

Although these countries have experienced similar improvement, the Government can claim some credit. Record investment in the NHS has helped increase access to angioplasty - the procedure for opening blocked coronary arteries - and in increasing the use of statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs taken by 3.4 million people. A decade ago, the UK was the coronary capital of the world - it had the highest death rate, long waiting lists and an indifferent service. Now, no heart patient waits more than three months for surgery, and falling workloads have forced some heart surgeons to retrain.

These immediate gains, though, are dwarfed by the improvement over the past 30 years. All western countries had been in the grip of a heart disease epidemic since the 1940s, which peaked in the early 1970s. Since then, death rates have fallen by more than half in the UK. The trend started long before Labour came to power. No one really knows what caused the epidemic, or what accounts for the decline, but smoking has, inevitably, played a major role. As smoking has declined, so have deaths from heart disease.

There is nothing governments like better than a safe bet, and the target 40 per cent reduction in heart deaths by 2010 was among the safest, because it matched the natural cycle of the disease. Ministers, doctors and the national director for heart disease, Roger Boyle, can claim half the credit; the other half is down to us.