RISK FACTORS FOR ANGINA AND HEART DISEASE
The British had been aware of their problem for more than a century. In 1871, a Dr. Haviland alluded to big differences in the numbers of deaths from heart disease in different regions of England and Wales. To the north of a line from the Severn River to the Wash bay, he wrote, people were especially prone to heart disease. South of the line, they seemed to be protected against it.
That line divided the prosperous south from the poorer north in Victorian Britain, but the differences were still there in 1978, the year of the start of the British Regional Heart Study. The Scottish towns had twice the heart attack rates of towns on the English south coast and there was a gradient from low to high in the towns in between, so that each town had a higher heart attack rate than its neighbor to the south, and a lower rate than its neighbor to the north.
The British Regional Heart Study divided the subjects into risk groups—according to age, smoking habit, Body Mass Index (BMI) (a measure of obesity), blood pressure, and blood cholesterol levels. It also divided them on whether they had signs of heart disease before entering the study. The results have painted an accurate picture of who is at highest risk of angina and heart attacks, and why.
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