Venue: Palmer Building, Whiteknights Campus

Professor Jon Gibbins, School of Biological Sciences
All Public Lecture Series events are free to attend and open to the general public.

Cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes cause high levels of suffering in the UK and beyond.

Indeed, being responsible for around one third of deaths each year in this country, most of use will have experienced the suffering caused by these diseases, through their effects on family members or friends. With such high incidence, exacerbated by an ageing population, it is pertinent to ask how can medical science help?

Such worrying statistics indicate that the approaches used currently to combat these diseases leave room for improvement. You may therefore be surprised to learn that research in the last 25 years into the causes, prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases have resulted in a decrease of around 50% in the death rates caused by these conditions.

So why do cardiovascular diseases continue to represent a future healthcare crisis? While the death rate has decreased, incidence rates are increasing rapidly, attributable to accelerating levels of obesity and related metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes and the metabolic syndrome. Indeed, reductions in the death rates from cardiovascular diseases are soon to be cancelled out through increased incidence.

This lecture will introduce the current approaches to the treatment of cardiovascular diseases and their underlying metabolic disorders, and will pose the question - should greater focus be paid in the future to the prevention of disease development, rather than repairing the damage once it has occurred? Is prevention better than cure?

No ticket is required but numbers are limited, so please arrive early. Large groups should telephone or email in advance.

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Web link: http://www.reading.ac.uk/publiclectureseries/cardiovascular_and_metaboli...

Contact: The University of Reading Public Lecture Series is a free event and all are welcome. There are limited places so please arrive early.

Large groups should contact us before the event.

If you have any queries about the Public lecture series, please use the following phone number or email address to get in touch.

Phone: 0118 378 7110

email: publiclectureseries@reading.ac.uk