Context

Most of the major non-communicable diseases share a number of risk factors including smoking, physical inactivity, hypertension and obesity. Detecting people with these risk factors, or an established disease, could help to reduce the associated potential adverse outcomes. The positive and negative impacts of population-based screening programmes, in addition to adventitious case-finding, are still uncertain because most trials of multiple risk factor interventions were carried out before high-quality trials of individual risk factor interventions were published. Modelling studies show that using global cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk as a basis for intervention is more cost-effective than basing decisions on reducing individual risk factors, and this …