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Corporate Social Responsibility. Sales Contacts. Ordering from Brill. Editorial Contacts. Offices Worlwide. Course Adoption. Contact Form. After the conquest of many infectious diseases and other health problems of industrializing societies, morbidity and mortality patterns in Europe became dominated by a range of chronic diseases, including ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, diabetes mellitus, various cancers, liver cirrhosis, dementia, and depression, as well as by injuries, including road traffic injuries and suicide.
Among the factors involved in the ultimate decline of these diseases, improvements in the effectiveness of medical care now also played a prominent role than in the past, but economic, political and sociocultural changes were still important in the background. As in previous periods, there were striking differences between European regions in the timing of the decline of these health problems, with Northern, Western and Southern Europe taking the lead.
Within high-income societies, they then became concentrated in lower socioeconomic groups, and thus in a sense turned into diseases of poverty. Nevertheless, their rise was in many cases a side-effect of rapid economic growth, which is why we present their secular trends under this heading.
Diseases of the cardiovascular system have spectacularly risen, and then spectacularly declined again, during the 20th century. This was not only a matter of filling the space left by infectious diseases β when people no longer died from infectious diseases, they lived longer, but ultimately had to die from something else β but the rates of cardiovascular disease also increased in real terms in many European countries.
