During the last two decades, several developed countries have demonstrated a dramatic decline in coronary heart disease mortality rates. On the other hand, cardiovascular disease (CVD) rates are rapidly rising in developing countries. Currently, over 80% of cardiovascular deaths occur in developing countries and about one-fourth of them are premature deaths. If the rising trends are to be halted and reversed, current approaches to addressing CVD and cardiovascular risk factors (especially hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia) need to be reformed.

In 2008, the global prevalence of hypertension and diabetes in adults was around 40% and 10%, respectively. The burden of hypertension and diabetes will worsen in the future due to behavioural changes, increasing obesity, and population ageing.

Population-wide policies to address salt consumption, harmful use of alcohol, physical inactivity, and unhealthy diets can lower the cardiovascular risk and have the potential for worldwide application. There is no shortage of effective treatment interventions for managing cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular risk factors. The challenge is to make them accessible in an equitable and affordable manner, particularly in developing countries. Most importantly, access to treatment of cardiovascular risk factors needs to be ensured to prevent heart attacks, strokes, congestive cardiac failure, chronic renal, disease and other preventable complications.

We invite investigators to contribute original scientific research as well as review articles on research and development that will contribute to the theme of this call for papers.

Contributions might include both solutions directly designed to address the global cardiovascular epidemic and concepts not directly designed for such use but having potential to influence improved global control of cardiovascular risk. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Contribution of raised blood pressure and diabetes to the global CVD burden
• Integrated approaches to detection and care of hypertension and diabetes
• Population-wide strategies for prevention of CVD
• Translational research to address the cardiovascular epidemic
• Scaling up prevention and control of CVD through a primary health care approach
• Global monitoring of the CVD epidemic

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijht/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: