TOP 10 Countries with Lowest CVD Mortality (2025)
TOP 10 Countries with the Lowest Cardiovascular Mortality (2025 Outlook)
Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) remain the leading cause of death worldwide, but a small group of countries has pushed age-standardized CVD mortality to exceptionally low levels. In 2025 these “cardiovascular outcomes leaders” show what is realistically achievable when prevention, early detection and high-quality treatment work together over decades.
This article uses the latest available age-standardized death rates from cardiovascular disease per 100,000 people to highlight the current top performers and explain why they stand out. Because death rates are age-standardized, the ranking compares countries as if they had the same age structure, which is crucial when analysing CVD, a disease heavily concentrated in older age groups.
Age-standardized CVD mortality is one of the clearest summary indicators of how well a health system and a society manage long-term cardiovascular risk. Lower values reflect fewer deaths per 100,000 people after adjusting for age.
The underlying numbers come from the 2024 update of the World Health Organization’s Global Health Estimates, processed by the Our World in Data team. The most recent comparable year is 2021, but trends over the last decade suggest that the same countries remain leaders as of 2025, even if exact values have shifted slightly downward thanks to ongoing improvements in prevention and treatment.
In the following sections you will see:
- a concise explanation of how the ranking is constructed;
- a table with the TOP 10 countries and their approximate CVD death rates;
- a simple bar-chart style diagram that visualizes the gap between leaders and the global average;
- an interpretation of the structural factors that keep CVD mortality low in these countries.
The goal is not to crown an absolute “healthiest” country but to identify common patterns that policy makers, clinicians and analysts can learn from when designing strategies to reduce premature cardiovascular mortality in their own settings.
For dashboards and statistical profiles, these ten countries provide a practical reference group: plotting other nations against their CVD mortality levels quickly shows how far a given health system still has to travel to reach the current global frontier.
Ranking and approximate age-standardized CVD death rates
The table below summarises the current leaders based on WHO Global Health Estimates, using the age-standardized cardiovascular death rate for both sexes, all ages, per 100,000 people (latest comparable year: 2021). Values are rounded to the nearest whole number and should be read as approximate indicators for the 2025 situation.
| Rank | Country | CVD deaths per 100,000 (age-std) | Region / income group |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Japan | ≈ 72 | High-income Asia–Pacific |
| 2 | France | ≈ 80 | Western Europe, high income |
| 3 | Israel | ≈ 82 | High-income Middle East |
| 4 | Singapore | ≈ 82 | High-income city state, Asia |
| 5 | Spain | ≈ 90 | Southern Europe, high income |
| 6 | Switzerland | ≈ 92 | Western Europe, high income |
| 7 | Norway | ≈ 95 | Nordic Europe, high income |
| 8 | Australia | ≈ 98 | Australasia, high income |
| 9 | Denmark | ≈ 99 | Nordic Europe, high income |
| 10 | Belgium | ≈ 100 | Western Europe, high income |
Note: The global average CVD death rate in 2021 was roughly 190–200 deaths per 100,000, so every country in this TOP 10 performs at around half the world average or better.
Japan and France as long-term benchmarks
Japan has been a global outlier in low CVD mortality for decades. A combination of universal health coverage, very high control rates for hypertension, relatively low obesity, and traditionally high consumption of fish and plant-based foods keeps cardiovascular risk comparatively low. At the same time, rising salt intake and population ageing are ongoing challenges that require continuous policy attention.
France is often cited as a Western European benchmark where cancer, not CVD, is now the leading cause of death. Cardiovascular mortality fell sharply from the 1980s thanks to aggressive reductions in smoking, improved acute care for heart attacks and strokes, and wide access to secondary-prevention medications such as statins and antihypertensives.
Compact health systems: Israel and Singapore
Both Israel and Singapore operate compact, highly organised health systems with near-universal coverage. Patients have quick access to primary care, and referral pathways to cardiologists and stroke units are well defined. These countries also invest heavily in registries and electronic health records, which support data-driven quality improvement and rapid diffusion of best practices.
Mediterranean and Nordic models
Spain illustrates the so-called Mediterranean model, where dietary patterns rich in olive oil, vegetables, legumes and fish, combined with universal health coverage, translate into relatively low CVD mortality. In contrast, Norway and Denmark represent Nordic systems with strong primary care, high taxation of tobacco and alcohol, and well-organised emergency services that shorten time to treatment for acute cardiovascular events.
Common traits of CVD mortality leaders
- universal or near-universal coverage for primary care and essential medicines;
- well-developed hospital networks with catheterisation labs and stroke units;
- population-wide measures that reduce smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol;
- robust health-information systems and national registries monitoring outcomes over time.
For analysts, this table is a compact starting point: it shows which health systems have already reduced cardiovascular mortality to very low levels and therefore provide realistic benchmarks. The exact order of countries may shift as new data appear, but the core message is stable — high-income systems that invest in prevention, universal coverage and timely treatment can bring CVD death rates close to one third of the levels observed in many low- and middle-income settings.
Visualising the gap: simple bar chart of CVD mortality leaders
The diagram below uses a static bar chart to show how the TOP 10 countries compare with a stylised global average of 195 deaths per 100,000. Bar lengths are scaled so that this global average is displayed as 100%, while each country’s bar reflects its relative position below that level. All labels are set in dark, high-contrast text to remain readable on both desktop and mobile screens.
For comparison, a country exactly at the global average (195 deaths per 100,000) would fill the entire bar width (100%). Every country in the chart sits well below that benchmark.
Why these countries sit so far below the global average
Several structural factors help explain why these countries consistently record such low age-standardized CVD death rates. First, they all provide broad access to primary care, where hypertension, diabetes and high cholesterol can be detected and treated early. This reduces the long-term risk of heart attacks and strokes and prevents many events from happening in the first place.
Second, they maintain high-quality acute cardiovascular care. Fast ambulance response, clear clinical pathways and wide availability of reperfusion procedures for myocardial infarction and organised stroke units dramatically improve survival when events occur. Survival gains in the acute phase partly explain why mortality continues to fall even as populations age.
Third, most leaders have adopted strong population-wide measures that shift risk-factor distributions at scale: tobacco taxation and smoking bans, salt reduction in processed foods, road-safety improvements, and urban policies that make walking and cycling easier. These interventions affect millions of people simultaneously and are often more powerful than individual counselling alone.
Policy lessons for countries with higher CVD mortality
- Prioritise universal access to blood-pressure checks, lipid testing and basic CVD medicines.
- Invest in emergency systems that shorten “symptom-to-needle” or “door-to-balloon” times.
- Track outcomes with national CVD registries and use them for quality improvement.
- Combine clinical guidelines with fiscal and regulatory tools that reduce salt, tobacco and trans fats.
Limitations of this simple comparison
Even a clean age-standardized ranking cannot capture every nuance of cardiovascular health. Some countries with relatively high incidence of CVD still achieve low mortality because their acute and post-event care is extremely strong. Others may report low mortality partly because of under-diagnosis or incomplete cause-of-death registration. Within each country, differences by income, ethnicity and place of residence can be as large as the gaps between countries.
For that reason, this diagram should be read as a high-level orientation tool rather than a final verdict. It highlights who currently sits at the frontier of low cardiovascular mortality and points to policy directions that can move other countries closer to that frontier in the years ahead.
Finally, it is important to note that within-country inequalities can be large even when national averages look excellent. Indigenous populations, low-income groups and people living in remote areas often bear a disproportionate share of cardiovascular risk. The next frontier for these TOP 10 countries is therefore not only to keep national averages low, but also to close remaining equity gaps in cardiovascular outcomes.
