Back to the topic: high cardiovascular mortality in Russia

The question ‘Why does Russia have such high cardiovascular (CV) mortality rates?’1 can be answered by a pathologist who practised during the Soviet time.2 Since then, the quality of postmortem examinations has decreased especially during the 1990s: autopsies were sometimes made perfunctorily. The deterioration in anatomic pathology and the healthcare in general during the 1990s coincided with the increase in the registered CV mortality. A tendency to overdiagnose CV diseases is generally known to exist also for people dying at home and not undergoing autopsy. If …