Driven by rising levels of obesity, increasingly fatty diets and heightened levels of alcoholism, heart disease has become a severe health threat in China. That is the conclusion of a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that between 1990 and 2016, the population of Chinese with cardiovascular disease grew by more than 14%.
The number of cases of cardiovascular disease in China in 2016 was estimated at about 94 million, more than two times the incidence of the disease in 1990.
Despite the stark growth in the incidence of cardiovascular disease, only about 3% of Chinese adults at risk for heart disease are taking aspirin or statins, which physicians say provide the best-known management of the life-threatening condition. And ever since increasingly Western diets became popular in China about thirty years ago, the rates of obesity and diabetes in China have soared.