Costs and Cost-Effectiveness of Interventions and Policies to Prevent and Treat Cardiovascular and Respiratory Diseases.

The risk factors and disease conditions covered in this volume of Disease Control Priorities constitute the majority of the health burden facing middle- and high-income countries (MICs and HICs, respectively) today and are fast approaching a majority of the burden in low-income countries (LICs). Previous editions of Disease Control Priorities, published in 1993 and 2006, acknowledged the importance of cardiovascular and related diseases (CVRDs) to the future health and economic well-being of populations in low- and middleincome countries (LMICs) and singled out tobacco taxes and treatment of heart disease with low-cost generics as high-priority, cost-effective interventions. With some exceptions, most of the conclusions about costeffectiveness were extrapolated from analyses done in HICs (Rodgers and others 2006) and from modeling, because of the paucity of economic analysis of interventions for CVRDs using LMIC data. In 2012, the World Health Organization (WHO) reviewed the costeffectiveness of noncommunicable disease (NCD) interventions, based on a limited number of modeled studies. The results were used to develop the WHO Best Buys for interventions recommended in the NCD Global Action Plan (WHO 2011). (...)