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(CNN) - The world is slowly seeing how cancer outpaces heart disease as the leading cause of death among middle-aged adults in several countries.
Globally, among adults aged 35 to 70, cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death, but the new research, published Tuesday in The Lancet, found that cancer deaths are now more common than caused by cardiovascular diseases in some high and middle income countries.
Those countries include Sweden, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Poland and Turkey.
The study is the largest of its kind that analyzes the causes of death on five continents, said Dr. Salim Yusuf, distinguished professor and executive director of the Population Health Research Institute at McMaster University in Canada, who was The lead author of the study.
"We have been watching the decline in cardiovascular disease for a while in many countries," he said. "It was only a matter of time before the progress we made in reducing cardiovascular disease mortality led to a drop in cardiovascular disease mortality rates below cancer."
The researchers observed in the study that “this epidemiological transition” could be due to better prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases in high-income countries, while successful strategies to prevent and treat different types of cancer, in addition to the control of Tobacco, should still lead to large reductions in most types of cancer.
Many deaths from cardiovascular diseases can be prevented
The study included the analysis of data on deaths and diseases among 162,534 adults on five continents. The data comes from a research effort called Prospective Study of Urban Rural Epidemiology, or PURE, and dates from 2005 to 2016.
The countries of origin of the adults studied were separated into three categories.
Low-income countries: Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. Then, middle-income countries: the Philippines, Iran, South Africa, Colombia, China, Brazil, Malaysia, Turkey, Poland, Argentina and Chile. Finally, high-income countries: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Canada and Sweden. The study notes that there was no accurate estimate of the income of Palestine, which was among the countries included.
After analyzing the data in those countries, the researchers found that noncommunicable diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, were the most common cause of deaths and diseases worldwide among adults.
The researchers also found that cardiovascular disease was more common in middle and lower income countries than in high income countries.
Meanwhile, there was a higher incidence of cancer death than cardiovascular disease in high-income countries and in some high-middle-income countries, according to the data.
In high-income countries, "cancer death was twice that of cardiovascular disease," the researchers wrote in the study. While, in low-income countries, "death from cardiovascular disease was three times greater than from cancer," they wrote.
Some of the same researchers also wrote a separate study, published Tuesday in The Lancet, which found that most cases of cardiovascular disease and deaths worldwide are preventable and can be attributed to a small number of modifiable risk factors.
The most important are "high blood pressure, tobacco and lipids, and surprisingly, low education, poor strength and pollution both indoors and outdoors," said Yusuf, who was the first author of that study.
Both studies had some limitations, including that, although they covered all five continents, they still did not include all the countries in the world. More research is needed to determine if the findings can be extrapolated to all countries.
Data within each income category may not be representative of all countries within those categories, "with particularly large gaps in information for countries in Africa and the Middle East," said an editorial that was published along with studies in The Lancet
Stephanie Read, of the Women's College Research Institute and Women's College Hospital in Toronto, and Sarah Wild, of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, co-authored that editorial.
However, the new findings “can inform about the effective use of limited resources, for example, by indicating the importance of improving education worldwide and improving diet and reducing air pollution in homes in less developed countries ”, Wrote Read and Wild.
"The value of collecting similar data to inform policies in a wider range of countries is clear, while improving lifestyle choices and modifying their social and commercial determinants remains a challenge," they wrote.
Cancer also exceeds heart disease in some regions of the United States
Although the United States was not included in the new studies, a separate investigation published last year in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that heart disease was the most likely leading cause of death in low-income counties across the country, while that cancer was the leading cause of death in many high-income counties.
"We are seeing a new epidemiological transition, from heart disease to cancer as the leading cause of death, which occurs first in high-income communities," said Dr. Latha Palaniappan, lead author of that previous research and professor of medicine at the Stanford University Medical Center in California. She did not participate in the new studies.
"This is an important opportunity, both in our country and throughout the world, to understand the factors that have led to the sharp decline in heart disease in high-income populations," he said. "Our challenge in the future is to apply these benefits evenly to less favored populations."
Heart disease cancers
