MASSDEVICE ON CALL — Death from cardiac disease is a slowly narrowing risk for European patients, but regional disparities are raising eyebrows.

Researchers at Oxford looked at trends in coronary disease related deaths from 1980 to 2008 and found a steady decrease in death rates in both sexes and all age groups, with the biggest dips in countries such as Denmark, Malta, the Netherlands, Sweden and the U.K.

Exceptions to the trend were Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Romania, which actually saw a increase in mortality in men.

"Overall, across the E.U., rates of death from coronary heart disease have continued to fall in most age groups in most countries. There are some exceptions, however, and there remain wide disparities across Europe in both the absolute rates of death from heart disease and the rates of improvement," said 1st author of the study Dr Melanie Nichols.

Researchers were careful not to draw any concrete conclusions correlating the drop to obesity and smoking rates, and even pointed out that some discrepancies might be explained by the way countries code data.

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