UK heart disease toll among highest in Western Europe

Britain has one of the highest death rates from heart disease in Western Europe but offers less treatment to sufferers than its neighbours, specialists said yesterday.

Despite a rapid fall in the UK death rate, which has halved in the last 30 years, the rates in other countries are falling faster. As a result, Britain now tops the league of heart deaths in Western Europe along with Ireland and Finland.

But the high rates in the UK are not matched by the provision of services. Angioplasty, a procedure to clear blocked coronary arteries, was three times more common in Germany than the UK, research found.

Heart disease claims the lives of four million Europeans each year, accounting for 40 per cent of all deaths in the under-74s, but its impact varies widely. The inequity was highlighted in new figures presented to the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) meeting in London yesterday.

Figures show that the death rate in Russia among those aged between 35 and 74 is eight times that of France, and in Ireland it is twice that of Italy. The lowest death rates are in the countries of Southern Europe, the highest are in Eastern Europe, where deaths from heart disease recently increased by 60 per cent.

Professor John Martin, consultant cardiologist at University College London and spokesman for the ESC, said it was likely that genetic differences made Northern Europeans more susceptible to heart disease than those from further south which, when combined with differences in lifestyle, accounted for the difference in death rates. "Having high cholesterol levels might have helped us survive the winter in the past but now it is working against us," he said.

British doctors were more likely to follow guidelines for assessing risk in heart patients, the meeting was told.

ESC research showed that only a fifth of doctors in France and Poland adhered to guidelines compared to a third in Germany, and Italy and three quarters of doctors in Spain and the UK. Professor Martin said: "We make an objective assessment of the risk based on measures including cholesterol level, blood pressure and smoking while doctors from most other countries do it by the seat of their pants."