Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality worldwide, accounting for around 20 million deaths a year. Around three quarters of the EU population lives in urban areas, where the risks of developing CVD are heightened by factors such as poverty, lack of access to healthcare, and lifestyle issues. The good news is that there are plenty of interventions that can help to combat CVD, including better education, earlier detection, and established and innovative therapies. Unfortunately, these often fail to reach the people who would benefit the most, especially those communities that are underserved by current healthcare programmes. The result of this inequality in cities can lead to a 20-year lower healthy life expectancy in deprived areas.
“Bold partnerships and collaborative innovation”
The aim of Cities@Heart is to deliver strategies that will help to reduce the burden of CVD in cities, close the health inequality gap, and ensure that every citizen can be reached regardless of gender, poverty, disability, background or culture.
“Cardiovascular disease remains a leading cause of death and morbidity globally,” commented the project’s industry lead, Jesús Ponce of Novartis. “Cities@Heart represents a vital opportunity to address the unmet needs of underserved populations in Europe through bold partnerships and collaborative innovation.”
Focus on the key drivers of CVD in cities
Cities@Heart will focus on the four key drivers of CVD: obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. These are the common causes for all types of CVD, such as heart attacks, heart failure, strokes, and vascular dementia. Cities@Heart will work across seven European cities that each have different CVD burdens, risk factors, and health inequalities: Belfast (Northern Ireland), Birmingham (England), Cork (Ireland), Izmir (Turkey), Łódź (Poland), Udine (Italy), and Utrecht (the Netherlands). Supported by the World Health Organization (WHO) European Healthy Cities Network, these cities have committed to improving public health through strategic, inclusive and sustainable actions.
The project’s first step will be to identify barriers to improving urban cardiovascular health, and explore ways of addressing them in collaboration with local community leaders, city councils, scientific societies, health professionals and industry partners. Knowledge gathered during this process will lay the foundations of the Cities@Heart Digital Ecosystem that will support the design, deployment and evaluation of city-based interventions that can benefit from recent and rapid advances in health technology.
“Huge strides have been made to better manage disease of the heart and circulation, but they still remain the world’s biggest killers,” said the project’s global director Dipak Kotecha of the Universities of Birmingham and Utrecht. “Cities@Heart aims to address the major driver of poor outcomes – inequalities in health and access to healthcare that affect many communities within our cities. We will jointly develop approaches with affected citizens, community leaders, city councils, clinicians, health policy leaders and industry partners to achieve long-term change.”
The goal: better prevention and care for cardiovascular conditions
Together with all stakeholders, Cities@Heart will co-create intervention strategies to raise community awareness of CVD risk factors, improve CVD prevention, prioritise earlier detection of CVD, and optimise CVD management. The intervention strategies will combine medical, technical, social and policy innovations, and will draw on the expertise of the project’s industry partners as well as existing municipal infrastructures. The interventions will be piloted in the cities to see whether they are effective, cost-effective, sustainable, and ready to scale across other European cities to reduce the burden of CVD and tackle health inequality.
Cities@Heart will contribute to building a future where all urban residents, regardless of their social or personal circumstances, have better access to prevention and care for cardiovascular conditions.