Foreword

Eugene Braunwald

摘要： At the beginning of the twentieth century,cardiovascular disease, particularly secondary to atherosclerosis, was relatively uncommon in North America and Western Europe and was quite rare in the remainder of the world. By the 1950s, cardiovascular disease had grown to epidemic proportions in the West and it had already become clear that hypertension,cigarette smoking and hyperlipidemia were important predisposing factors for atherosclerosis; in the 1960s,diabetes mellitus emerged as an additional important risk factor. Cardiovascular disease was still uncommon in regions of the world where malnutrition, childhood diarrhea and infectious disease were rampant and by far the leading causes of death.