The burden of cardiovascular disease in Australia for the year 2003:

Detailed description of the level and distribution of diseases and injuries and their causes is an important input to the planning of health services and development of strategies for improving population health. This report describes the burden of cardiovascular disease in Australia for the year 2003 and represents the latest application of burden of disease methodology in this country. These estimates form part of a complete suite of updated results that were released in May 2007. New methods of attributing disease and mortality to risk factors addressing the shortcomings of previous risk attribution studies have recently been developed at the World Health Organization (WHO). This report presents findings based on these methods to quantify the burden of disease attributable to seven common lifestyle risk factors (blood pressure, body mass, cholesterol, fruit and vegetable intake, physical activity, tobacco, and alcohol use) and their joint effects for Australia in 200