Health Burden of Multi-morbidity and Risk of Death in the UK

Multi-morbidity that includes at least one potentially fatal illness, such as diabetes or high blood pressure, as well as coronary heart disease increases the risk of death for people living in Great Britain. A recent research shows that 90 percent of the population in the UK who already has heart disease also has another condition that can increase the risk of death. Of the total population, which is about 2.3 million, more than half (57%) have at least three “multi-morbidities” – a total of 1.31 million people.

The British Heart Foundation (BHF), who carried out the research, reported that the growing number of people who have more than one serious illness “represents a grave challenge for a health system focused on treating individual illnesses”.

Almost six in 10 of the 2.3 million (1.26 million) people have high blood pressure with coronary heart disease. There are 579,000 with diabetes, 313,000 have suffered a stroke and 284,000 also have heart failure.

These findings show the need to urgently improve the treatment of these 2.3 million medically vulnerable patients to reduce the number of people with multimorbidity who die prematurely.

“Over the years, we’ve made huge progress in improving survival rates for single conditions like heart attacks. However, today’s figures point towards an emerging and very urgent challenge.” said Simon Gillespie, the BHF’s chief executive.

Other research findings show that the number of patients living with heart and circulatory disease and at least five other illnesses rose sharply – from 6.3% to 24.3% – between 2000 and 2014.

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“While factors like an ageing population, and the increasing number of people with conditions like diabetes is contributing, they don’t fully explain the trends we’re seeing” said Prof Sir Nilesh Samani, the BHF’s medical director.

Source-Medindia