A ten-year comparative study of cardiovascular disease publications, health and socioeconomic indicators between European countries

The aim of this study was to investigate and compare gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, the number of physicians per one million inhabitants, the number of cardiovascular disease (CVD) publications, standardized death rate (SDR) from ischemic heart disease (IHD) and CVD per 100 000 inhabitants per year between European countries. GDP per capita from the Eurostat database served as the socioeconomic indicator, whereas human resources in medicine were reported as the number of physicians per million inhabitants. PubMed was searched for CVD publications published between 2005 and 2014 for each country. The rate per million inhabitants and proportions of CVD publications in the MEDLINE database were calculated. Results showed that although Croatia was the only country with stagnation in GDP per capita and with a lower rate of physicians than Austria (P = 0.007) and the Czech Republic (P = 0.005), Croatia had a lower SDR from IHD and CVD than the European region (P = 0.05, P = 0.021; respectively), and had a continuous decrease in the average annual growth rate of IHD and CVD (-2.36%, -3.81%; respectively). In conclusion our study showed that Croatia, despite being the only country with the stagnation of GDP per capita and a relatively low rate of physicians, had a SDR from IHD and CVD that was lower than in the European region which continuously decreased during the study period.