Changing United States Life-Style and Declining Vascular Mortality: Cause or Coincidence?

Henry Blackburn advanced the idea that physicians tend to take either an academic or pragmatic view of atherosclerosis.1 The academic view asserts that attempts to change individual living habits are hopeless — that research should be directed toward seeking a scientific answer. The pragmatic view contends that atherosclerosis is predominantly the result of a life-style in most affluent societies and that modification of this environment is the rational way to prevent coronary heart disease — a socioeconomic and cultural evolution.Age-adjusted mortality from coronary heart disease increased 19 per cent in the United States from 1950 to 1963. Early in . . .