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Lecture Notes

And not only is cardiovascular disease a problem in the United States because of the number of deaths that it causes each year, but the total direct and indirect cost of cardiovascular disease and stroke in the United States for 2008 was estimated to be almost $300 billion. $300 billion; that's a lot of money spent on diseases that are, at least in part, preventable through lifestyle behaviors. And so what you can see in the graphs here is that these costs are expected to continue to increase for the projected 2015 through 2030 years, and it doesn't matter what type of cardiovascular disease we're talking about, whether it's hypertension, coronary heart disease, heart failure, stroke, or any other number of cardiovascular diseases. These costs are expected to increase from now through the year 2030.