Changing United States Life-Style and Declining Vascular Mortality: Cause or Coincidence?

Abstract

Henry Blackburn advanced the idea that physicians tend to take either an academic or pragmatic view of atherosclerosis.¹ The academic view asserts that attempts to change individual living habits are hopeless — that research should be directed toward seeking a scientific answer. The pragmatic view contends that atherosclerosis is predominantly the result of a life-style in most affluent societies and that modification of this environment is the rational way to prevent coronary heart disease — a socioeconomic and cultural evolution.Age-adjusted mortality from coronary heart disease increased 19 per cent in the United States from 1950 to 1963. Early in . . .