Heart Attack Patients Going Home From the Hospital in Greater Numbers
There's good news on the heart front: The death rate among people hospitalized for a heart attack has been cut in half over the past few years. According to a large study, which appears in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association and involves 44,372 patients from 113 hospitals in 14 countries, new treatment guidelines have cut the percentage of heart attack patients who died in the hospital from 8.4 percent to 4.6 percent between 1999 and 2005. The proportion experiencing heart failure dropped from 19.5 percent to 11 percent; of those getting another heart attack within six months, from 4.8 percent to 2 percent.
"We saw a marked improvement in outcomes. What we've shown is what can be done," says the study's lead author Keith Fox, a cardiologist at the University of Edinburgh.
The new guidelines responsible for the improvements include aggressive efforts to reopen blocked coronary arteries quickly and better drugs for heart failure and to prevent future attacks. Joel Gore, a coauthor of the study and a cardiologist at the University of Massachusetts, notes, however, that these are life-saving, last resort measures. The best treatment for heart disease, he emphasizes, is to prevent it in the first place. The study was funded by a grant from Sanofi-Aventis, maker of several heart drugs including Plavix and ACE inhibitors.
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