WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9, 2010 (Health.com) — Heart attacks dropped by 24% in a large cross section of Northern Californians over the past decade, most likely due to less smoking, better blood pressure control, and lower cholesterol, a new study reports.
What’s more, rates of the most severe type of heart attack dropped by 62%, according to the study, published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“We believe improvements in targeting risk factors are in part responsible,” says the study’s senior author, Alan Go, MD, the assistant director for clinical research at Kaiser Permanente, in Oakland. “We’ve observed in our population that fewer people are smoking, and there’s better control of blood pressure and cholesterol.”
All of the 46,086 heart attack patients in the study were insured by Kaiser Permanente Northern California, a private not-for-profit health plan that serves more than 3 million people.
The plunge in heart attack rates may not reflect trends elsewhere in the country, or even in other Northern Californians, however. Although the study patients were ethnically diverse and ranged in age from 30 to 90-plus, they all had one thing in common: They were insured and received quality preventive care.
“The Kaiser Permanente people, almost by definition, are employed,” says Thomas Pearson, MD, the director of the Prevention Research Center at the University of Rochester Medical Center, in Rochester, N.Y. “They are on a health-care plan, one which has paid attention to making sure people get guidelines.”
The study included “haves” but no “have-nots,” Dr. Pearson adds. Still, he says, the findings “provide a pretty good map” for how to prevent heart disease and reduce heart attacks.
Dr. Go and his colleagues looked at the 10 years spanning 1999 and 2008. During that period, the percentage of Kaiser Permanente Northern California members meeting recommended blood pressure levels doubled (from 40% to 80%), while the percentage of those with healthy levels of LDL (or bad cholesterol, a primary culprit in heart disease) rose from 67% to 73%.
The use of heart medications—including beta-blockers, cholesterol-lowering statins, and aspirin—increased during those years as well.
Next page: Prevention pays off
