17 April 2025
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is my pleasure to join you here today at the TCT Plus Middle East inaugural international conference on cardiovascular care.
We come from a Region of broken hearts. It is enough to turn on the news to have your heart broken a million times each day.
But the deeper heartbreak is lived by displaced families in Sudan and Syria, civilians under fire in Gaza, and chronically ill patients in Yemen struggling without care.
Non-communicable diseases—including cardiovascular disease—don’t stop in times of crisis. In conflict zones, people face empty pharmacies, chronic stress, and limited access to nutritious food or safe spaces to be active.
In these environments, hospitalizations for heart disease often double or triple due to the lack of even basic care.
But this crisis is not limited to countries in conflict. Cardiovascular and other non-communicable diseases are stretching health systems across our entire region.
It may surprise some to know that it is not conflict, natural disaster or a virus that takes the most lives, but diseases of the heart.
Cardiovascular disease remains the world’s number one killer, claiming 18 million lives each year. Alarmingly, nine per cent of these deaths occur in the Eastern Mediterranean Region.
Our region has the highest burden of cardiovascular disease globally, with over 50 million cases in 2019. Without action, this number could more than double to 108 million by 2045.
This is a race against time—but it’s one we can win.
Heart disease is both the world’s deadliest and one of the most preventable conditions.
86 per cent