Severity of Heart Attacks Decreasing, 2 Studies Find
Americans’ heart attacks are becoming smaller and less lethal, probably as a result of healthier living habits and better medicines, two studies being presented today found.
The studies show a remarkable decline in the severity of heart attacks in recent years. Even though heart attacks remain exceedingly common and serious, the data suggest that people’s chances of surviving them have increased dramatically.
Experts believe that a combination of healthier living habits, better heart medicines and more intense treatment immediately after heart attacks are making them more survivable.
The latest data, being presented in Orlando at a conference sponsored by the American Heart Assn., show that heart attacks became less severe between the late 1980s and the early ‘90s. Researchers believe this is the continuation of a trend that probably began after heart attack deaths peaked in the United States in 1963.
In 1996, 477,000 Americans died of coronary heart disease. According to government statistics, there would have been 1.1 million deaths by then if the rate had stayed at its 1960s high.
Dr. Carole Derby of New England Research Institutes in Watertown, Mass., looked at heart attack trends in two southeastern New England towns between 1980 and 1991. Although the number of survivable heart attacks went up, heart attack deaths fell by half.
During this time, 6,117 men and women suffered heart attacks. She found that the rate of nonfatal heart attacks increased 37% in women and 25% in men during this period. But the fatal heart attacks declined 50% in women and 47% in men.
In the other study, Dr. David C. Goff Jr. of Wake Forest University looked at 4,900 heart attack victims over an eight-year period in four communities in Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina and Mississippi. He found a drop in the level of creatine kinase, an enzyme released by damaged heart tissue.
