Our heart disease prevention programs are working
Heart attacks went down by 24 percent among Northern California Kaiser Permanente members since 2000, and the number of serious heart attacks that do permanent damage dropped by 62 percent, according to a study by our Division of Research published in the June 2010 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.
The study looked at more than 46,000 members from 1999 to 2008 who experienced a heart attack, focusing on severe heart attacks, known as ST-segment elevation heart attacks.
“The ST-segment heart attacks are the ones that require very rapid treatment to open up a blocked blood vessel, and those are the heart attacks we really want to try to prevent,” says Alan Go, MD, director of the Comprehensive Clinical Research Unit and lead investigator of the study.
Dr. Go says Kaiser Permanente’s heart disease prevention programs played a role in this decline. Programs such as PHASE (Prevent Heart Attacks and Strokes Everyday) help members reduce their risk by:
- Encouraging healthy eating and exercising
- Promoting the benefits of quitting smoking
- Evaluating whether medications such as aspirin, statins, beta blockers, and ACE inhibitors should be prescribed
Dr. Go says, “Our findings show that patients can help themselves and work with their personal physicians to lower their risks.”
Learn how to lower your risk and read more about this study.
Featured Stories
Real men stay fit and live healthy
Men tend to have a higher rate of unhealthy behaviors that lead to serious health problems than women.
Feeling sleepy?
Help get a better night’s sleep with this online program.
Cause for concern?
Juanita Watts, MD, discusses osteoporosis medication.
