Statistics are very important to the BHF. They represent the scale of the burden of heart and circulatory disease in the UK and the challenges we face.
Along with medical advances and lifestyle changes, the BHF’s pioneering research has helped to halve deaths from heart and circulatory diseases in the UK. However, these conditions still kill more than one in four people in the UK. Below are some of the key statistics:
- Heart and circulatory diseases cause more than a quarter of all deaths in the UK, that’s nearly 170,000 deaths each year – an average of 460 deaths each day or one every three minutes in the UK.
- There are around 7.4 million people living with heart and circulatory disease in the UK: 3.9 million men and 3.5 million women.
- Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the most common type of heart and circulatory disease. It is also the most common cause of heart attack and the single biggest killer worldwide.
- In the UK there are more than 100,000 hospital admissions each year due to heart attacks: that's one every five minutes.
- Around 1.4 million people alive in the UK today have survived a heart attack.
- Over 900,000 people in the UK are living with heart failure.
- Strokes cause around 36,000 deaths in the UK each year and are the biggest cause of severe disability.
- People with a family history of coronary heart disease are much more likely to develop vascular dementia.
- There are more than 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the UK each year. The survival rate is just 1 in 10.
- More than 3.9 million adults in the UK have been diagnosed with diabetes.
All of our factsheets are on our heart statistics page.
View our factsheets