Cardiometabolic Disease (CMD) in Sub-Saharan Africa: Tackling Mechanisms, Care Models and Policy Gaps

Non-communicable diseases, particularly cardiometabolic diseases (CMDs) such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, are becoming increasingly prevalent in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) and have emerged as one of the region’s main causes of mortality. Despite this growing burden, SSA is characterised by a severe dearth of well researched context-specific mechanistic data, underdeveloped care provision infrastructure, and highly fragmented health policies. The current understanding of CMDs employed within the population in SSA, including pathophysiology, risk stratification, and treatment algorithms, is vastly derived from populations of European ancestry, limiting both the accuracy of risk prediction and the appropriateness of applied clinical interventions for SSA populations who exhibit distinct biological and phenotypic profiles. This proposal seeks to build directly on recently published foundational arguments from the Africa-Europe Cluster of Research Excellence collaborative and the AMedRA expert panel cardiovascular health statements. Both statements called for a paradigm shift: from imported frameworks to Africa-centred science, from disease management to primordial prevention, from siloed to integrated care and better policy spaces to foster all the required innovations and research. This, we propose, can be achieved by convening a multidisciplinary consortium of basic scientists and practitioners/policy experts to interrogate the unique mechanisms underlying CMDs in SSA, define their distinctive clinical phenotypes, evaluate contextually appropriate care models, and recommend actionable regional policy reforms.