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As per Reuters the rate of heart attacks in California alone has fallen by 24 percent in between 200 and 2008. US researchers claim that the reason for the fall is better care.
New England Journal of Medicine has conducted the largest survey ever since the new treatments and medicines for preventing heart attacks have been adopted. The study examined more than 46,000 hospitalizations for heart attack.
Not just California, but all countries across United States have shown a similar declining trend. The possible reasons for this decline are being registered as the bans on smoking in public places, better treatment of high blood pressure and high cholesterol by the doctors.
Dr. Robert Yeh from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues said “the 24 percent drop was seen even though doctors can better detect heart attacks and despite the growing rates of diabetes and obesity, both of which raise the risk of heart attack”.
“We would expect an increase in heart attacks because we’re picking up more heart attacks than we used to,” Yeh added. “We found that, despite that, they are still going down.”
The data used for the survey recorded and monitored almost 3 million people from the Kaiser Permanente Northern California health system, which is the largest medical group in the United States; this data has paid for major part of the study.
The major decrease has been recorded for people who have been suffering from the most damaging type of heart attacks. The decrease has reduced by 62 percent since 2000. The records were measured by an elevation of the ST segment in the wave that usually appears on the heart monitor. Such deadly attacks need to be treated rapidly with the use of clot-busting drugs or by using tube-like stents which help to keep the arteries open.
The Non-ST segment heart attacks affect only a smaller portion of the heart wall, thus they are not considered to be very dangerous. These types of heart attacks had peaked in the year 2004 and have shown a declining trend ever since. They are usually treated with the help of drugs only.
“Despite our ability to more easily diagnose heart attacks using sensitive biomarkers, we found a consistent trend of fewer severe ST-elevation myocardial infarctions over the past decade, the type of heart attack we particularly want to prevent,” said Dr. Alan Go, of Kaiser, who led the study.
According to Yeh and his colleagues even other studies like those done in Minnesota and Massachusetts also suggest the declining trend of the heart attacks.
“But published literature from these studies is limited to data collected before 2002 — before many current strategies for the prevention and management of cardiovascular disease were implemented more widely in the community,” the researchers wrote.
“The rate of improvement has slowed down or stopped,” they added.
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