Prevalence of chronic rheumatic heart disease in Chinese adults
Introduction
Rheumatic heart disease continues to be a common health problem in the developing countries, leading to morbidity and mortality among children and adults. In North American Indians, prevalence of rheumatic heart disease varied from 0.6/1000 among school-age children to < 0.05/1000 among those discharged from hospitals. In developing nations, rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease continue unabated, affecting an estimated 5 to 30 million people worldwide [1], [2], [3]. In China, though evidence indicates that rheumatic heart disease prevalence has decreased since the 1950s, its exact prevalence is unknown [4].
Knowledge of the prevalence of rheumatic heart disease is important for effective public health strategies for prevention and intervention. In the present study, we investigated the prevalence of rheumatic heart disease in China by using a data available from a large survey [5].
Section snippets
Samples
The study is a community-population based survey with a multistage, random sampling design and was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the participating hospitals and by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Science and Technology. The subjects were recruited from nine geographically diverse suburban and urban communities according to age, sex, and residential area on the local census tracts in China between October 2001 and February 2002. These tracts listed ages, names, addresses, and
Results
Participants (9124) were interviewed, and 8652 completed the questionnaires and underwent clinical evaluation, 8080 completed echocardiographic examinations. In this study, 20–29 year old women were the smallest age–gender group (7.8%), and 30–39 year old men were the largest age–gender group (11.6%). Workers were the largest occupational group (33%) and civil service employees the second largest (29.9%). Of 8080 subjects, 7882 were of Han nationality (96.9%), 14 Hui (0.2%), 10 Man (0.1%), and
Discussion
In this retrospective study, we found that the prevalence of chronic rheumatic heart disease was 186/100,000 adults and 10 times higher than the prevalence in industrialized countries such as Canada (0.22/1000) and Japan (0.14/1000) [9], [10]. It is thus a significant health burden in China. It has long been known that incidence of acute rheumatic fever and prevalence of rheumatic heart disease have declined since the 1950s, with improved living standards and public health, but the true
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to express their thanks to Beijing Municipal Commission of Science and Technology for their support.
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Contributed equally.