A new analysis of the economic costs of cardiovascular disease in the EU has found that it cost a total of 282bn Euros in 2021.
The research was presented at the conference of the European Society of Cardiology held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Of the total cost, 55% was health and long-term care, accounting for 11% of EU health expenditure.
The analysis was based on Europe-wide patient registries and surveys, and covered the costs of long-term social care, not included in the previous analysis of 2006.
Other costs measured in the report are informal care (28% of the total cost), productivity losses due to illness/disability (5%), and productivity losses due to premature death (12%).
Informal care covers the work or leisure time, valued in monetary terms, that relatives and friends gave up to provide unpaid care.
Averaged out, the cost is equivalent to 630 Euros per EU citizen, for the year 2021. The lowest cost per person was in Denmark, at 6%, and the highest in Hungary, at 19%
“Cardiovascular disease had a significant impact on the EU27 economy, equivalent to 2% of Europe’s gross domestic product and is significantly more than the entire EU budget used to fund research, agriculture, infrastructure and energy across the Union,” said author Dr Ramon Luengo-Fernandez of the University of Oxford, UK.
Co-author Professor Victor Aboyans of Limoges University, France, added: “This study underscores the urgent need to act collectively on the European scale to better combat the cardiovascular risk of European citizens, in particular through regulations for better cardiovascular prevention and investment in research.
“By choosing not to invest in cardiovascular disease we are simply deferring the cost. These data force us to ask the question: do we invest in cardiovascular health today or be forced to pay more at a later stage?”
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