Preventing cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes

Collectively, cardiovascular disease (including stroke), diabetes, and cancer account for over 60% of all deaths in the USA and UK, and are major burdens on health resources and costs (table).1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 Traditionally, the approaches to prevention of these three broad disease groups have operated separately. But increasingly it is recognised that major risk factors—ie, smoking, obesity, and physical inactivity—are common to all three diseases, and that current prevention strategies fail to capitalise on existing knowledge. As trends in the prevalence rates of these risk factors increase in many countries, with few examples of them abating, there are potentially greater problems in the future.12 Two new initiatives—one in the USA,13 one in the UK14—now address these issues.