About National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases

National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases

The National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, commonly abbreviated to NCCD, is China's biggest and most comprehensive national centre for cardiovascular disease. It was founded in 2011 with support from the Ministry of Science and Technology and is based at Fuwai Hospital in Beijing, the hospital most renowned for the treatment of cardiovascular disease in China. The centre is the national hub around which prevention, treatment, research and education for cardiovascular disease are organised, and its work is cited in the scientific literature under the combined affiliation of Fuwai Hospital, the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing 100037, China.

This profile is about the centre itself. Fuwai Hospital provides its institutional home and much of its clinical setting, but the centre's distinctive role is national rather than purely hospital-based: compiling China's annual cardiovascular report, leading national surveillance of cardiovascular events and risk factors, hosting national-level laboratories and clinical research structures, and organising experts from across the country to produce evidence for prevention, treatment and government decision-making.

Origins and foundation in 2011

The centre did not begin from nothing in 2011. It evolved from the first state key laboratory of cardiovascular disease in China, set up in 1984 with the goal of conducting research to improve the prevention and management of cardiovascular disease. That laboratory lineage explains why research into prevention and management, rather than treatment alone, has remained central to the centre's identity.

A published review of cardiovascular research in China describes the NCCD as the biggest and most comprehensive centre of its kind to emerge from a wider national effort. The urgent call for cardiovascular research and substantial financial support encouraged and enabled the setting up of research centres and key laboratories at national, ministerial and provincial levels, and the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, founded in 2011, was the largest of them. Based in the centre, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, jointly with the Ministry of Health, also set up the Technical Platform for Cardiovascular Disease drug research and development under the Key New Drug Innovation Project.

The scale of research support attached to the centre in its early years was substantial. The same review reported that 63.5 million US dollars had been granted to principal investigators at the centre from the '973 programme' and the '863 programme' in the preceding five years, and that in 2011 alone more than 19 million US dollars was granted. Those figures belong to the period described by that review and are presented here as evidence of the centre's national research standing at its foundation, not as current funding totals.

Base at Fuwai Hospital in Beijing

The centre is based at Fuwai Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, in Beijing. Fuwai Hospital was founded in 1956 and is described in the literature as China's largest specialist cardiovascular hospital and the world's largest cardiovascular centre. It is a Grade A tertiary hospital, renowned internationally for the treatment of complex and severe cardiovascular diseases, and it is China's national centre for cardiovascular clinical healthcare, medical research, disease prevention and education.

Author affiliations in the centre's reports and research papers give its Beijing address as 167 Beilishi Road, Xicheng District, Beijing 100037, in the form used for the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases in the outline of the 2014 national report. The World Health Organization likewise describes Fuwai Hospital as belonging to the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and as being the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, noting that it has become the world's biggest cardiovascular centre and a national centre for clinical healthcare, medical research, disease prevention and education, committed to controlling the morbidity and mortality of cardiovascular diseases by setting up a network of prevention and control.

That hospital context matters because it places the centre inside a working specialist institution rather than a purely administrative office. At the same time, readers should not confuse the two: Fuwai's wards, operating history and hospital ranking are the setting, while the centre's own outputs — the annual report, national surveillance and national research coordination described below — are its defining work.

National laboratories and clinical research roles

The centre hosts two national-level structures that appear repeatedly in its publications: the State Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Disease and the National Clinical Research Center for Cardiovascular Diseases. Fuwai Hospital is described as encompassing the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, the State Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Disease and the National Clinical Research Center of Cardiovascular Diseases, and researchers publishing from Beijing routinely list all three affiliations together, alongside the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College.

The State Key Laboratory affiliation appears, for example, on the 2025 editorial marking two decades of the annual report, whose authors are listed at the State Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Disease, the Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Epidemiology and the Department of Epidemiology, Fuwai Hospital, National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases. That combination of a state key laboratory, an epidemiology laboratory and a hospital department illustrates how the centre links laboratory science, population research and clinical medicine within a single national institution.

Leadership

Professor Shengshou Hu has been identified in institutional and academic sources as Director of the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases and President of Fuwai Hospital. Hu is an expert in cardiovascular surgery. According to his Tongji Medical College biography, he was born in Wuhan, Hubei Province, graduated from the Clinical Medicine Department of Wuhan Medical College in 1982 and obtained a master's degree in surgery from Peking Union Medical College in 1989. The biography states that he has long been engaged in clinical, teaching and scientific research work in cardiovascular surgery and established a series of minimally invasive treatment technologies for coronary heart disease surgery in China.

Hu's name also appears as a leading author on the centre's national reporting work. He is listed for the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, Beijing, on the summary of the China cardiovascular diseases report 2018, and as the corresponding author for the writing committee of the Report on Cardiovascular Health and Diseases in China in later annual summaries. A history of Fuwai Hospital likewise described Shengshou Hu, as President of Fuwai Hospital and Director of the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, as the figure behind improved cardiovascular patient care and the strengthening of research infrastructure in China. Those attributions are dated to the sources that made them and are not presented here as a current staff list.

The annual report since 2005

The centre's best-known and longest-running output is its annual national report. Since 2005, the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases has compiled comprehensive reports on cardiovascular disease to guide prevention and treatment efforts, support government decision-making and promote international exchange and collaboration. The 2023 summary states the purpose in similar terms: the centre has organised experts from relevant fields across China to compile the Report on Cardiovascular Health and Diseases in China annually since 2005, in order to implement a national policy of focusing on primary health institutions and emphasising prevention, and to achieve a shift of cardiovascular prevention and treatment from hospitals to communities.

The work of assembling the report is deliberately multidisciplinary. Since 2005 the centre has directed experts in cardiology, neurology, nephrology, diabetes, epidemiology, community healthcare, health economics, biostatistics and other related fields to prepare the annual report. The report is built, the 2023 summary explains, on representative, published and high-quality big-data research results from cross-sectional and cohort population epidemiological surveys, randomised controlled clinical trials, large-sample registry studies and typical community prevention and treatment cases, along with data from some projects undertaken by the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases itself.

The 2014 outline of the report summarised its scope as trends in cardiovascular disease, morbidity and mortality of major cardiovascular diseases, an up-to-date assessment of risk factors, health resources for cardiovascular disease and a profile of medical expenditure, with the aim of providing evidence for decision-making in cardiovascular prevention and control programmes in China and delivering authoritative information on prevention and control for all citizens.

From disease report to health and disease report in 2019

In 2019 the report's name and framing changed. To implement the policy of focusing on primary healthcare and putting prevention first in the Healthy China 2030 Initiative, the report was renamed from the Report on Cardiovascular Diseases in China to the Report on Cardiovascular Health and Diseases in China, marking a shift from a treatment-centred to a health-centred approach and advocating life-course management. Since 2019, editorial accounts note, more emphasis has been placed on health across the life course.

The report's influence is measurable in citations. Related summaries and interpretations published in Chinese and English journals such as Chinese Circulation Journal, Biomedical and Environmental Sciences and the Journal of Geriatric Cardiology have been cited more than 25,000 times, according to the 2025 editorial marking two decades of progress. That editorial also notes that, in addition to epidemiological trends and clinical practices, the report documents annual outputs in basic and clinical research and the approval of cardiovascular devices, offering an overview of scientific progress in China, and that in 2023–2024 China ranked second globally in cardiovascular publications, behind only the United States, with a higher growth rate.

The 2024 edition was a milestone: it marked the 20th year since the report's first publication in 2005, having witnessed the development of cardiovascular prevention and treatment in China, with influence on health policy and clinical practice.

The burden the centre documents

The reports explain why a national centre on this scale exists. Due to population ageing, urbanisation and the increasing prevalence of unhealthy lifestyles, the prevalence of cardiovascular disease in China is on the rise. The 2025 two-decade editorial estimated 330 million people with cardiovascular disease, including 13.00 million cases of stroke and 11.39 million cases of coronary heart disease, and stated that cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death, with mortality projected to rise in the following two decades. Annual reports have revealed that the crude mortality of cardiovascular disease remains on an upward trend, with no inflection point observed.

The fuller breakdown published for the 2023 report put the estimated 330 million patients as including 245 million with hypertension, 13 million with stroke, 45.3 million with peripheral arterial disease, 11.39 million with coronary heart disease, 8.9 million with heart failure, 5 million with pulmonary heart disease, 4.87 million with atrial fibrillation, 2.5 million with rheumatic heart disease and 2 million with congenital heart disease. In 2021, the 2023 summary reported, cardiovascular disease accounted for 48.98 percent of deaths in rural areas and 47.35 percent of deaths in urban areas — in the wording used in earlier summaries, two out of every five deaths could be attributed to cardiovascular disease.

National surveillance led by the centre since 2023

Since 2023 the annual report has drawn on a new layer of evidence generated by the centre itself. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the cardiovascular burden in China, the report has continually expanded its data sources, and since 2023 it has incorporated data from national surveillance projects led by the NCCD, including the Surveillance of Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Events among Chinese Residents project and the China Cardiovascular Disease and Risk Factors Surveillance project. By collecting long-term and nationally representative data on cardiovascular disease and its risk factors, those projects provide more robust local evidence for guiding policy decisions.

The 2024 report's interpretation gives the scale of the events surveillance. From January to December 2023, analysis of data from the Surveillance of Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Events among Chinese Residents project — covering 262 monitoring sites across 30 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government, and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps — found that the incidence rate of stroke among residents aged 18 years and above was 491.0 per 100,000, and the incidence rate of acute myocardial infarction was 87.6 per 100,000. The combined crude incidence of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, including acute myocardial infarction, angina pectoris treated with percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty or stent implantation and/or coronary artery bypass grafting, stroke and sudden cardiac death, was 620.33 per 100,000 among residents aged 18 and above, and the prevalence of adult coronary heart disease was 758 per 100,000.

The companion risk-factor surveillance provides the population background. The China Cardiovascular Disease and Risk Factors Surveillance project, conducted in 31 provinces with 262 monitoring sites from 2020 to 2022 and with an effective sample size of 293,022 people, preliminarily showed rates of overweight, obesity and central obesity among adults aged 18 and above of 34.6 percent, 17.8 percent and 34.9 percent respectively. The 2024 report also updated data on tobacco use, physical activity, diet and nutrition, overweight and obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, sleep and psychological factors, environmental factors and the diagnostic conditions of cardiovascular diseases.

Risk factors and a widening prevention agenda

The centre's reporting has gradually widened beyond the traditional risk factors. In addition to smoking, diet, physical activity, obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes, chronic kidney disease and air pollution, recent reports have gradually included temperature, mental health and sleep quality. Editorial commentary on the report argues that prevention and control need to shift from a biomedical model to a comprehensive framework encompassing multiple health determinants, including society and psychology, in line with the focus of international research.

The same commentary warns that several risk factors are shifting toward younger populations, including earlier initiation of smoking, a rising prevalence of obesity and increasing rates of insufficient physical activity, underscoring the importance of health education and of early identification and intervention to promote health management across the life course. The challenges named for the period ahead are the inadequate control of cardiovascular risk factors, an increasing disease and economic burden, and inequities in clinical diagnosis and treatment.

National research coordination: the China PEACE example

Beyond reporting and surveillance, the centre has served as a national coordinating base for collaborative outcomes research. The China PEACE — Patient-Centered Evaluative Assessment of Cardiac Events — platform is described in its study protocols as a collaborative effort among the China National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, the Yale-New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, the Chinese government and a national network of Chinese hospitals, with the goal of generating new knowledge relevant to practice and policy and translating that knowledge into action to improve care and outcomes for patients with cardiovascular disease.

The National Coordinating Center for the China PEACE-Prospective AMI study was based at the NCCD and Fuwai Hospital in Beijing and worked in close collaboration with ten regional coordinating centres in various regions of China. That prospective study recruited 4,000 patients treated for acute myocardial infarction in 53 hospitals — 35 tertiary and 18 secondary — located in 21 of China's 31 provinces, with the first patient enrolled in December 2012 and follow-up finished in June 2015. The related China PEACE Million Persons Project enrolled 2,660,666 community residents aged 35 to 75 years from all 31 provinces in China, according to a study of dyslipidemia in primary care settings that used its data. Those projects are cited here as documented examples of the centre's coordinating role; they should not be read as a complete catalogue of its research programmes.

Role, limits and significance

Taken together, the verified record presents the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases as an institution with three interlocking functions. It is a research centre, evolved from China's first state key cardiovascular laboratory of 1984 and formally founded in 2011, hosting the State Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Disease and the National Clinical Research Center for Cardiovascular Diseases. It is a national reporting authority, compiling the annual Report on Cardiovascular Health and Diseases in China since 2005 and, since 2023, feeding that report with its own national surveillance of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events and of cardiovascular disease and risk factors. And it is a coordinating centre, based at Fuwai Hospital — a hospital founded in 1956 under the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and described as the world's largest cardiovascular centre — whose academic leaders, the literature notes, play a role in advising the Chinese government on health care and medical education matters through the hospital's direct link to national health authorities.

Its significance therefore does not rest on a single hospital service. It rests on continuity: two decades of annual reporting, a laboratory lineage reaching back to 1984, and surveillance covering hundreds of monitoring sites across almost the whole country, all directed at a disease burden its own reports estimate at 330 million people and describe as China's leading cause of death, with no inflection point yet observed.