World Heart Day 2012 : Focus on Women and Children

 
 This year our efforts will focus on protecting the hearts of women and children through heart-healthy actions. 

 This year, World Heart Day is even more significant given that at the 65th World Health Assembly in May 2012, governments from 194 countries agreed to the first-ever global mortality target on non-communicable diseases (NCDs – including CVD, diabetes, cancer and chronic respiratory diseases) and made a commitment to reduce premature NCD deaths by 25 per cent by 2025.
  Since CVD accounts for nearly half of the 36 million deaths due to NCDs, we have a major role to play in achieving this target. 

This year in continuation from our 2011 theme of home heart health we will make 2012 the year of cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention among women and children because:

Urbanization and Cardiovascular Disease: Raising Heart-Healthy Children in Today’s Cities

WORLD HEART FEDERATION CALLS FOR URGENT ACTION TO PROTECT CHILDREN’S HEART HEALTH IN WORLD’S MOST POPULOUS CITIES

New S.P.A.C.E strategy to address threat to the cardiovascular health of the world’s urban children

Geneva, 29 September 2011 – On World Heart Day, the World Heart Federation calls for a new approach to make cities heart healthier for the children who live in them. The call to action follows research commissioned by them which shows that increasing urbanization threatens the current and future heart health of children.


The research results are presented in a new report entitled, Urbanization and Cardiovascular Disease: Raising Heart-Healthy Children in Today’s Cities. The report summary – made available today – shows how urban life in low- and middle-income countries – often imposes limitations on the ways in which children live, and restricts opportunities for heart-healthy behaviours. In large cities across the globe, urban living actually facilitates unhealthy behaviour in children, including: physical inactivity, eating unhealthy foods, and even tobacco use by children as young as two. Crowded city living environments can also spread diseases such as rheumatic fever, which if left untreated, can cause rheumatic heart disease.

The report notes that children are particularly at risk of the negative health effects of city life, since they are most dependent on and affected by their living environment. Since urbanization is continuing to occur rapidly worldwide, urgent action is needed to prevent an “epidemic” of cardiovascular disease (CVD) including heart attacks and stroke.