Editorial Coronary disease surveillance: a public heath imperative

This editorial refers to ‘Contribution of changes in inci-dence and mortality to trends in the prevalence of coro-nary heart disease in the United Kingdom: 1996 to 2005’ by A.R. Davies et al., doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehm272 Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of death in the Western world, thereby constituting an immense public health problem. While CHD mortality declined in the last four decades, the use of age-adjusted rates to describe CHDmortality obscures the fact that the decline largely repre-sents the postponement of CHD deaths until older age. In fact, the burden of CHD is increasing in parallel with the increase in life expectancy.1 As the burden of prevalent CHD is increasing, identifying persons with CHD, measuring its incidence and outcome and how these vary over time and across populations is essential to understand the deter