Reducing the global prevalence of cardiometabolic risk factors: a bet worth winning

The prevalence of potentially preventable and reversible cardiometabolic risk factors continues to increase in many countries around the world. The importance of this has been emphasised once again by the Investigators of the Global Burden of Diseases (GBD), in the article published in this issue of Metabolism, showing that metabolic diseases continue to pose significant health challenges, although there are important differences in health burdens that have occurred over the last 30 years. Overall, this analysis underscores the necessity for a coordinated global health initiative to stem the tide of these debilitating diseases and improve population health outcomes worldwide. The scientific community is well aware of this public health issue. Several calls for action have been made and numerous attempts at educational intervention have been proposed and implemented in various countries around the world. Despite this, the increasing trends in incidence of obesity, type 2 diabetes, pertension, dyslipidemia and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) are worrying. These trends appear to be slowing in some countries, although they do not appear to be plateauing or indeed reversing and in others growth is continuing at a near exponential rate. This has reached a critical stage and now requires a different approach. Probably, we should start looking at this scenario from a different perspective.