Heart Disease Kills 10,000 Under-65s Every Year

Around 200 adults under the age of 65 die every week due to heart disease, sparking a new hard-hitting campaign.

The British Heart Foundation is warning adults not to be complacent about the risk of heart disease.

The charity is putting the family at the centre of a television advert in which they appeal for more funding to research the causes of coronary heart disease which remains the biggest killer in the UK.

As the leading cause of heart attacks, coronary heart disease claims some 70,000 lives each year, among them, nearly 10,000 adults of working age - equal to around 200 deaths in adults under 65 each week.

Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: "Through medical research, we've made great progress in saving the lives of people suffering from heart attacks.

"But we mustn't be lulled into thinking we've beaten the disease. Every year thousands of people are still dying from heart attacks, and coronary heart disease remains the UK's single biggest killer.

"We urgently need to fund more research to find new ways to prevent and treat heart attacks, and ultimately, save more lives.

"Despite knowing there are genetic and lifestyle factors which increase the risk of heart attacks, we still have no way to stop the furring of the arteries in coronary heart disease that is responsible for causing so many heart attacks.

"This is a challenge that only research can provide the answer to."

And it is not just regular smokers and eaters of fatty food who are at risk.

Researchers say that anyone can be affected however healthily they eat and however much they exercise.

The British Heart Foundation says that we understand remarkably little about the process that leads to narrowing of the coronary arteries.

At 37, Priscilla Chandro was not expecting to suffer a heart attack. Eight years on, she is warning younger people not to be complacent about the risks.

"With a heart attack you either live or you die, there's no in-between," she said. "For me it came completely out of the blue and it highlighted how precious life is.

"But it made me think more about what I could do now. 'Was I all right to go dancing on a Saturday night or go for a walk?'. All those questions kept coming up.

"Being younger, there weren't that many people to talk to about it and a lot of people go into denial, they put it to the back of their mind. It was a huge life-changing event.

"Life's so short, anything can happen to anybody at any time. I was very lucky, I survived.

"But there could be someone else who won't survive so I would say people just need to be more conscious of how we're living in today's world."

The British Heart Foundation says fatalities from heart attacks have been declining over the past 40 years but with one-in-three heart attacks ending in fatality, they say the only way to reduce that number is to understand more and the only way to understand more is to invest in research.