Abstract
Background:Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death and disability worldwide. Health research is crucial to managing disease burden. Previous work has highlighted marked discrepancies in research output and disease burden between high-income countries (HICs) and low- and lower-middle-income countries (LI-LMICs) and there is little data to understand whether this gap has bridged in recent years. We conducted a global, country level bibliometric analysis of CVD publications with respect to trends in disease burden and county development indicators.Methods:A search filter with a precision and recall of 0.92 and 0.91 respectively was developed to extract cardiovascular publications from the Web of Science (WOS) for the years 2008–2017. Data for disease burden and country development indicators were extracted from the Global Burden of Disease and the World Bank database respectively.Results:Our search revealed 847,708 CVD publications for the period 2008–17, with a 43.4% increase over the decade. HICs contributed 81.1% of the global CVD research output and accounted for 8.1% and 8.5% of global CVD DALY losses deaths respectively. LI-LMICs contributed 2.8% of the total output and accounted for 59.5% and 57.1% global CVD DALY losses and death rates.Conclusions:A glaring disparity in research output and disease burden persists. While LI-LMICs contribute to the majority of DALYs and mortality from CVD globally, their contribution to research output remains the lowest. These data call on national health budgets and international funding support to allocate funds to strengthen research capacity and translational research to impact CVD burden in LI-LMICs.
Highlights
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), principally cardiovascular diseases (CVD), chronic respiratory diseases, cancer and diabetes, claim more than 41 million lives annually, accounting for 60–70% of global deaths [1,2,3,4,5]
We performed a bibliometric analysis of global cardiovascular publications, burden of disease and country development indicators over 10 years (2008–2017)
Cardiovascular research output increased steadily over the decade, with a 43.4% increase in absolute counts of cardiovascular publications in 2017 compared to 2008 (Figure 1)
Summary
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), principally cardiovascular diseases (CVD), chronic respiratory diseases, cancer and diabetes, claim more than 41 million lives annually, accounting for 60–70% of global deaths [1,2,3,4,5]. High income countries have fervently addressed the rising prevalence of CVD burden by using health research to discover disease pathogenesis, develop treatment, enhance health system infrastructures, track and improve outcomes, and target risk factors at person and population levels [15,16,17] Such a trend has been less evident in the low- and lower-middle-income group [14, 18]. Previous work has highlighted marked discrepancies in research output and disease burden between high-income countries (HICs) and low- and lower-middle-income countries (LI-LMICs) and there is little data to understand whether this gap has bridged in recent years. While LI-LMICs contribute to the majority of DALYs and mortality from CVD globally, their contribution to research output remains the lowest These data call on national health budgets and international funding support to allocate funds to strengthen research capacity and translational research to impact CVD burden in LI-LMICs
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