Ischaemic heart disease.

There can be no truly objective frequency estimate of the susceptibility of the population to ischaemic heart disease: everybody has some degree of susceptibility. The disease kills 1 in 4 of the population, and 1 man in 10 dies of ischaemic heart disease before 65 years of age. The major burden is mortality, though there is often some degree of impairment among survivors of acute attacks. It is in fact mainly a problem of sudden death: as many as 50% of deaths occur within an hour of onset of the attack.