Cardiovascular disease remains a massive public health crisis in the US, highlighting the critical need for early identification and primary prevention of risk factors in younger populations.
ardiovascular disease (CVD) in the United States represents a continuing crisis of epidemic proportions, with nearly 960 000 individuals dying from heart disease and stroke each year. 1 CVD has been the leading cause of death in this country every year since 1900, with the exception of 1918, the year of the great influenza epidemic.According to the most recent statistics, if all forms of major CVD were eliminated, life expectancy would rise almost 7 years.Furthermore, although often perceived as a disease of older age, approximately 50% of CVD diagnoses and 15% of CVD deaths are in patients under 65 years of age. 1 Of greater significance, many young adults with no clinical evidence of CVD have two or more risk factors that predispose them to subsequent clinical events and death over the course of several decades.2,3 In apparently healthy young people, these risk factors usually go unrecognized and untreated.
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Robert O. Bonow (2002) studied this question.
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