Physical Activity & Cardiovascular Disease: Systematic Review Protocol (Thesis Proposal Sample)

ROLE OF PHYSICAL ACTIVITY ON CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASES IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW
SYSTEMATIC REVIEW PROTOCOL
Background Information
The world is facing a double burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases (Boutayeb, 2010), but their impact varies (Kostova et al., 2017). A 2017 Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study reveals that non-communicable diseases (NCDs) remain the leading cause of death, accounting for close to three quarters (73.4%) of all deaths globally. Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the most common, with ischemic heart disease (IHD) taking the lead (Roth et al., 2018a).
Sub-Saharan Africa faces an immense burden of CVDs (Hosseinpoor et al., 2012; Moran et al., 2013a). Though data shows that high-income countries record high age-adjusted CVD mortality rates compared to Sub-Saharan Africa, Africa records the highest absolute CVD deaths, and the numbers have more than doubled in the past three decades (VizHub, 2022). There has been an epidemiologic transition in Sub-Saharan Africa from previously over 70 years, accounting for more than half of all CVD-related deaths, to now younger populations (Rani, Nusrat and Hawken, 2012). This has led to increasing disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) (Moran et al., 2013; Remenyi et al., 2013; Mensah et al., 2015; Keates et al., 2017)
According to a 2013 study, ischemic heart disease, stroke, and hypertensive heart disease occur most frequently in Sub-Saharan Africa and are responsible for most of the deaths in the region (Mensah, 2013). The epidemiologic transition of ischemic heart disease (IHD) is striking in Sub-Saharan Africa and globally. It accounted for 6% of all CVDs in SSA in the 1990s (Yuyun et al., 2020) but had risen to account for over 50% of all CVDs