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12
FIRST APPLICATIONS FOR SICKNESS BENEFIT
Dotted lines—Maximum and Minimum 1951—62 Continuous line—1963
Heart disease
Besides being responsible for a prodigious loss of man-working
capacity in the United Kingdom amounting, it is estimated, to some
12 million week days per year, cardiovascular and atherosclerotic
disease as a group are responsible for more deaths than any other
single cause and, as such, constitute the greatest possible challenge
to preventive medicine. The urgency of this problem becomes intensified
when it is realised that deaths from arteriosclerotic and
degenerative heart disease are mounting year by year.
In animals where atherosclerosis has been artificially induced,
occlusion is so rare that it would appear that the problem is not simply
the thickening of arteries but of their blockage or occlusion and some
research workers are confident that the cause is to be found in a disturbance
of the fat and cholesterol metabolism and coagulability of the
arterial blood.
A glance at table 7 will be enough to show how the percentage of
deaths from such maladies have risen over the past 35 years, and the
high numbers occurring in the age groups 45-65,