Global Correlates of Cardiovascular Risk: A Comparison of 158 Countries
Faculty of Sports Studies, Masaryk University, Kamenice 5, 625 00 Brno, Czech Republic
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Nutrients 2018, 10(4), 411; https://doi.org/10.3390/nu10040411
Received: 7 February 2018
/
Revised: 21 March 2018
/
Accepted: 23 March 2018
/
Published: 26 March 2018
The aim of this study was a large-scale ecological analysis of nutritional and other environmental factors potentially associated with the incidence of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) in the global context. Indicators of CVDs from 158 countries were compared with the statistics of mean intake (supply) of 60 food items between 1993 and 2011, obesity rates, health expenditure and life expectancy. This comparison shows that the relationship between CVD indicators (raised blood pressure, CVD mortality, raised blood glucose) and independent variables in the global context is influenced by various factors, such as short life expectancy, religiously conditioned dietary customs, the imprecision of some statistics and undernutrition. However, regardless of the statistical method used, the results always show very similar trends and identify high carbohydrate consumption (mainly in the form of cereals and wheat, in particular) as the dietary factor most consistently associated with the risk of CVDs. These findings are in line with the changing view of the causes of CVDs. Because only the statistics of raised blood glucose include people using medications and reflect true prevalence that is independent of healthcare, more objective data on the prevalence of CVDs are needed to confirm these observed trends.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
cardiovascular diseases; risk factors; nutrition; ecological study
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Supplementary File 1:
Supplementary (ZIP, 1316 KiB)
-
Externally hosted supplementary file 1
Doi: Doi: Supplementary information
Description: Supplementary information
MDPI and ACS Style
Grasgruber, P.; Cacek, J.; Hrazdíra, E.; Hřebíčková, S.; Sebera, M. Global Correlates of Cardiovascular Risk: A Comparison of 158 Countries. Nutrients 2018, 10, 411. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu10040411
AMA Style
Grasgruber P, Cacek J, Hrazdíra E, Hřebíčková S, Sebera M. Global Correlates of Cardiovascular Risk: A Comparison of 158 Countries. Nutrients. 2018; 10(4):411. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu10040411
Chicago/Turabian StyleGrasgruber, Pavel, Jan Cacek, Eduard Hrazdíra, Sylva Hřebíčková, and Martin Sebera. 2018. "Global Correlates of Cardiovascular Risk: A Comparison of 158 Countries" Nutrients 10, no. 4: 411. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu10040411
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
