[The relevance of mortality due to circulatory system diseases in Spain].

Cardiovascular diseases is the first cause of death in Spain, as it occurs in most western countries, with a crude death rate of 306 per 100,000 inhabitants in the male population and 351 in the female population in 1987. While this represented a 44.9% of all death causes in 1976, it represented a 42.6% in 1987. Death due to cardiovascular diseases, once corrected for the aging population, has decreased at a yearly rate of 1.26% in males and 1.6% in females from 1968 to 1987 (last year with available date). Most part of the decrease is due to a mean annual decrease of 3% in cerebrovascular mortality since the mid 70s, followed by a reduction in coronary deaths, slightly above 1% annually, since approximately the same time. The changes in life style that have taken place, together with medical and surgical advances and the influence of other factors which have not been so widely studied could be responsible for the potential saving of over 12,000 deaths due to cardiovascular diseases, which would have been added to those occurred in 1987 if mortality rate due to cardiovascular diseases had been the same as in 1976. The difficulty to assign a quantified degree of responsibility changes constitutes a research challenge, not discrediting the preventive action on this facts which are already known.