Trends and disparities in coronary heart disease, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases in the United States: findings of the national conference on cardiovascular disease prevention

A workshop was held September 27 through 29, 1999, to address issues relating to national trends in mortality and morbidity from cardiovascular diseases; the apparent slowing of declines in mortality from cardiovascular diseases; levels and trends in risk factors for cardiovascular diseases; disparities in cardiovascular diseases by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and geography; trends in cardiovascular disease preventive and treatment services; and strategies for efforts to reduce cardiovascular diseases overall and to reduce disparities among subpopulations. The conference concluded that coronary heart disease mortality is still declining in the United States as a whole, although perhaps at a slower rate than in the 1980s; that stroke mortality rates have declined little, if at all, since 1990; and that there are striking differences in cardiovascular death rates by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and geography. Trends in risk factors are consistent with a slowing of the decline in mortality; there has been little recent progress in risk factors such as smoking, physical inactivity, and hypertension control. There are increasing levels of obesity and type 2 diabetes, with major differences among subpopulations. There is considerable activity in population-wide prevention, primary prevention for higher risk people, and secondary prevention, but wide disparities exist among groups on the basis of socioeconomic status and geography, pointing to major gaps in efforts to use available, proven approaches to control cardiovascular diseases. Recommendations for strategies to attain the year 2010 health objectives were made.

Evaluating South Carolina's community cardiovascular disease prevention project

A community cardiovascular disease prevention program was undertaken as a cooperative effort of the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control and the Centers for Disease Control of the Public Health Service. As part of the evaluation of the project, a large scale community health survey was conducted by the State and Federal agencies. The successful design and implementation of the survey, which included telephone and in-home interviews as well as clinical assessments of participants, is described. Interview response rates were adequate, although physical assessments were completed on only 61 percent of those interviewed. Households without telephones were difficult and costly to identify, and young adults were difficult to locate for survey participation. The survey produced baseline data for program planning and for measuring the success of ongoing intervention efforts. Survey data also have been used to estimate the prevalence of selected cardiovascular disease risk factors.