Heart Diseases: Young People
(asked on 16th July 2025) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what data his Department holds on the number of people aged 14 to 35 who die each year as a result of a primarily cardiac health condition.
NHS England has published the national service specification Inherited Cardiac Conditions (All Ages), that covers patients who often present as young adults with previously undiagnosed cardiac disease and families requiring follow up due to a death from this cause. This describes the service model and mandated guidelines and guidance that should be followed to support the diagnosis and treatment of patients or family members. It also includes the requirement for inherited cardiac conditions services to investigate suspected cases. Further information on the Inherited Cardiac Conditions (All Ages) service specification is available at the following link:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/cardiology-inherited-cardiac-conditions.pdf
NHS England has published a suite of national service specifications and standards for congenital heart disease, which define the standards of care expected from all organisations funded by NHS England, to support and improve the diagnosis and treatment of patients with congenital cardiac problems.
There are no plans to publish further specific information on people under the age of 35 years old with cardiac abnormalities, over and above those who would be covered by the service specifications referenced above.
Data shows that in 2022, there were 939 people under the age of 35 years old who died due to heart and circulatory conditions. Further information, including historic data and a breakdown of death by high level condition, is available on the British Heart Failure website, at the following link:
NHS England does not hold the data for the number of deaths following out of hospital cardiac arrests (OHCAs). The following table shows the number of cardiac arrest patients in England receiving an organised emergency medical services response, whether resuscitation was attempted, continued, terminated, or not attempted, the number where resuscitation was commenced or continued by an ambulance service, and the number of those with survival at 30 days, from 2020 to 2024:
| 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
Cardiac arrest patients in England receiving an organised emergency medical services response, whether resuscitation was attempted, continued, terminated, or not attempted | 93,920 | 95,093 | 99,111 | 95,227 | 96,049 |
Number where resuscitation was commenced or continued by an Ambulance Service | 30,841 | 32,486 | 34,195 | 32,031 | 32,932 |
Number of those with survival at 30 days | 2,497 | 2,783 | 2,660 | 2,943 | 3,144 |
Source: NHS England’s Ambulance Quality Indicators, available at the following link:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/ambulance-quality-indicators/
Notes:
- the 2020 figure is survival to discharge from hospital rather than survival at 30 days, and may be incomplete;
- during the COVID-19 pandemic, data suppliers in some hospitals were moved to other duties, making data on survival harder to obtain than data on deaths; and
- due to a trust-wide outage of the Electronic Patient Clinical Record, data is unavailable from 1 April to 30 September 2023 for the Isle of Wight, and incomplete for the South Central Ambulance Service from July to September 2023.
Publicly available data on OHCAs can also be found on the University of Warwick’s out-of-hospital cardiac arrest outcomes website, at the following link:
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/med/research/ctu/trials/ohcao/