Awareness

Introduction

Cardiovascular diseases cause a significant decline in quality of life, reduce people’s ability to function, and increase healthcare costs. Moreover, they stand out as the leading cause of death among adults.

These conditions, such as myocardial infarction and stroke, develop from what we know as cardiovascular risk factors, which include diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, elevated cholesterol levels, as well as behavioral patterns or habits such as an unhealthy diet, overweight, obesity, physical inactivity, smoking, alcoholism, and inadequate sleep patterns.

These risk factors tend to develop slowly and may present few or no symptoms while their level of threat increases.

This low level of alarm is a fundamental factor that helps explain the sustained increase over recent decades in the prevalence of these risk factors in the general population.