Beyond Translation: Building a Lusophone Alliance for Cardiovascular Care

The science of cardiovascular prevention has reached a plateau of implementation. Despite an extensive arsenal of effective interventions, including antihypertensive pharmacotherapy, lipid-lowering agents, tobacco control, and population-level risk reduction, the global burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) continues to rise, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries. But the failure is not one of discovery; it is of delivery. The prevailing model of cardiovascular evidence generation—largely produced, debated, and disseminated within high-income, research-intensive systems—has struggled to gain traction in other health-system contexts where NCDs account for the greatest share of morbidity and mortality.

Interventions validated in well-resourced, highly specialised environments will often be implemented, if at all, within systems challenged by workforce shortages, fragmented care pathways, constrained financing, and with different epidemiological profiles. As a result, evidence that is robust in principle may prove fragile in practice. Bridging this gap requires not just translation of language, but also of systems.

[…]