Community echocardiographic screening reveals a massive burden of undetected valvular heart disease affecting half of the elderly population, highlighting an emerging epidemic.
Previously undetected VHD affects 1 in 2 of the elderly population and is more common in lower socioeconomic classes. These unique data demonstrate the contemporary clinical and epidemiological characteristics of VHD in a large population-based cohort of older people and confirm the scale of the emerging epidemic of VHD, with widespread implications for clinicians and healthcare resources.
d’Arcy et al. (Sun,) studied this question.