Guidelines for the Prevention of Coronary Heart Disease

Coronary heart disease (CHD) emerged in North America and Europe as a leading cause of disease and death in the mid 20th century, and is now rapidly increasing in developing nations. By the mid 1980s, American and European academic institutions had issued several sets of guidelines indicating ways to prevent CHD. Continually revised and broadly disseminated since then, CHD guidelines have become increasingly based on evidence derived from several fields of medical science including prospective clinical trials. All CHD guidelines emphasise a healthy lifestyle and the judicious use of drugs, and the focus now is on the cost of, and barriers to, the implementation of internationally adopted CHD guidelines, and on methods by which to make them acceptable and useful at national and local levels. Such methods include the development of national guidelines and the organisation of shared care programmes and healthcare teams.