Why are UK cardiovascular deaths in under 65s rising again?

Just a decade ago newspaper headlines and The BMJ were reporting a dramatic reduction in deaths from heart disease.12 Experts credited the fall to wider prescribing of statins and drugs for high blood pressure and also successful campaigns to bring down smoking rates. Fast forward to May 2025 and the story is very different. An analysis by the British Heart Foundation shows that cardiovascular disease mortality in working age adults (20 to 64 years) rose steadily from 49 deaths per 100 000 population in 2019 to 55 per 100 000 in 2023.3 The charity said that up to 2019 the overall death rate from heart disease had been declining since the organisation’s founding in 1961.

Bryan Williams, a professor and the foundation’s chief scientific and medical officer, told The BMJ, “Every decade over the past 60 years we’ve seen a progressive reduction in events due to heart disease, and then in the past five years we’ve started to see that flatten and now begin to increase. That’s the thing that’s a real concern to us, because we’re losing a generation of progress here in reducing risk.”