“Iniciativa VIVE” Program

March 2011, the Pro CNIC Foundation and the SHE Foundation signed a collaboration agreement under the name “VIVE” Initiative, with the aim of joining forces to improve the cardiovascular health of Spaniards. This agreement gave rise to a joint coordination plan led by Dr. Valentí Fuster, director of the National Centre for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC).

Cardiovascular diseases continue to be the leading cause of death by disease in Spain, with 31.7% of cases, ahead of other ailments such as cancer (26.9%) or respiratory diseases (11.4%). Moreover, cardiovascular diseases cost more than 9 billion euros for Spain and some 192 billion for the European Union as a whole. Experts agree that the only way to prevent the spread of cardiovascular disease is none other than a change in the population’s lifestyle and an awareness of the need to promote healthy habits. Thus, the challenge for the 21st century is how to move from disease treatment to preventive health care. However, resources are limited and investments must be analysed and prioritised to ensure that they are effective and actually achieve their objective. The two ways to achieve effective health promotion in Spain are: research and prevention, which must unite in the face of a common challenge, supporting and complementing each other. This philosophy became a reality with the signing of the “VIVE” Initiative, which exemplifies a type of structured sponsorship with a scientific and measurable objective that clearly leads to an improvement in cardiovascular health.

For Dr. Valentí Fuster, “it is essential to achieve health promotion through research and intervention aimed at the acquisition of healthy habits from an early age that are maintained over the course of a lifetime. It is also essential to apply a scientific methodology to prevention studies with an evaluation of the results, which can then be corroborated. The “VIVE” Initiative allows us to take a further step towards achieving this”. The “VIVE” Initiative also makes it possible to collaborate in the dissemination of knowledge to promote health in children and young people, thus fulfilling the objective of fighting this socially and economically unsustainable epidemic”.