Cardiovascular disease (CVD), the world’s leading cause of mortality, is becoming a major killer of Africans, killing more than 1m people in sub-Saharan Africa each year and closer to home, affecting a fifth of Discovery Health Medical Scheme’s 2.7m members in 2025, reports News24.
Discovery’s latest HealthTrend26 report, released last week, showed that CVD, mental health conditions, diabetes and cancer accounted for 84% of chronic care expenditure, and that the conditions also increasingly overlap, with more than half of scheme members now living with multiple chronic conditions.
But while current statistics suggest an alarming “impending tsunami” as cardiac mortality is expected to balloon by 2030, a novel approach involving Zulu folk music – maskandi – has been used to encourage heart health among the country’s millions of minibus taxi drivers.
“The cardiac mortality in Africa has been predicted to hugely increase by 2030,” said Dr David Jankelow, a clinical cardiologist and past president of the SA Heart Association, in a panel discussion at the release of Discovery’s HealthTrend26 report, “and we need to alter this trajectory.”
The HealthTrend26 report shows that CVD has risen significantly over the past decade, affecting one in five members in 2025 and accounting for 53% of its annual expenditure.
In 2015, only 13.3% of DHMS members had cardiovascular disease. The scheme projects the costs of the disease will rise by 45% over the next five years, despite it being one of the most preventable health problems with the correct lifestyle interventions.
Jankelow said one of the most interesting projects he had worked on was a survey by non-profit company SA Heart on the cardiovascular health of minibus taxi drivers, whose working conditions are characterised by long hours, high stress and poor diets. He said about 75% of the drivers are overweight or obese, with many smoking to cope with stress or suffering from hypertension and diabetes.
“Many have never had a heart screening before,” said Jankelow. The survey was part of the Check My Beat campaign in 2024 and 2025.
Many of the drivers, he said, use maskandi music to get them through the long days, and the campaign used AI to create a song using this genre to generate personal songs for them that contained positive heart health messages.
“As our project unfolds, we’re hoping to collect more and more data to get valuable insights.”
Mental health claims rise
The HealthTrend26 report showed that mental health issues were becoming a bigger component of the scheme’s overall disease burden, particularly among younger adults.
Prevalence among members aged 18 to 30 has increased by 80% – from one in 12 in 2015, to one in seven in 2025.
This might be due to a combination of increasingly stressed lives, increased help-seeking, improved screening, and expanded access, but the rise in prevalence was an indicator of earlier intervention, as hospital admission rates for mental health conditions dropped 11% between 2015 and 2025.
In 2025, Discovery funded R4.6bn in cancer-related claims, with breast cancer (28%), prostate cancer (20%) and non-melanoma skin cancer (8%) being the three most prevalent. While there had been a 120% increase in the prevalence of cancer over the past decade, the mortality rate had declined by 48% since 2010 as increased screening improved early diagnosis.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Cardiologists call for help, local research, for Africa’s CVD burden
CVD among top three causes of death in SA