Economic burden of severe cardiovascular diseases in Brazil: an estimate based on secondary data.

Background: The scarce amount of data available in Brazil on the economic burden of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) does not justify the growing concern in regard to the economic burden involved.

Objective: The present study aims at estimating the costs of severe CVD cases in Brazil.

Methods: Cases of severe CVD were estimated based on hospitalized cases lethality and total CVD mortality rates.

Spanish flu and early 20th-century expansion of a coronary heart disease-prone subpopulation.

According to Stephen Jay Gould, "we have a strong preference for seeing trends as entities moving somewhere." However, trends may instead be the product of relative expansions and contractions of different subpopulations constituting the system. Variation in attributes of coronary heart disease cases during the decline in coronary heart disease mortality suggests a change in the primary source-subpopulation of cases over time.

Similarities in mortality patterns from influenza in the first half of the 20th century and the rise and fall of ischemic heart disease in the United States: a new hypothesis concerning the coronary heart disease epidemic.

The classic risk factors for developing coronary heart disease (CHD) explain less than 50% of the decrease in mortality observed since 1950. The transition currently under way, from the degenerative to the infectious-inflammatory paradigm, requires a new causal interpretation of temporal trends. The following is an ecological study based on data from the United States showing that in men and women an association between the age distribution of mortality due to influenza and pneumonia (I&P) associated with the influenza pandemic in 1918-1919 in the 10-49-year age bracket and the distribution of CHD mortality from 1920 to 1985 in survivors from the corresponding birth cohorts.