Heart disease health centre

Heart attack death rate halves in a decade

26th January 2011 - The number of people dying as a result of heart attacks in England has halved in the last decade.

A study has found that, compared with earlier years, there were fewer heart attacks between 2002 and 2010 and fewer fatalities.

Better care, fewer risks

The authors say reducing cardiovascular risk factors, together with better hospital survival rates, have contributed to the fall. However, one major heart charity says too many people are still dying before medical help arrives.

Several studies have noted falls in the number of heart attacks in developed nations around the world since the 1970s, but reasons for the drop in rates in England had not been explored.  Researchers from the University of Oxford set out to find what lay behind the drop.

The study

They looked at medical records of 840,175 men and women of all ages who had each had at least one heart attack between 2002 and 2010. Hospital and mortality figures showed that the overall death rate from heart attacks fell by 50% in men and 53% in women.

In their paper published on bmj.com, the researchers concluded that just over half of the decline in total deaths can be attributed to a drop in the number of new heart attacks, and just under half to a fall in the number of people dying as a result of a heart attack. They put this down to a reduction in cardiovascular risk factors as well as improvement in NHS hospital care which has seen more people still alive 30 days after a heart attack.

However, they also note that the reasons behind the fall in heart attack deaths differ according to sex age and geographical region.

For instance, the researchers noted a spike in the heart attack rate in London between 2007 and 2009, which they say may have been caused by the financial crisis that peaked around that time and greatly affected the capital's financial district.

Importantly, big improvements were seen among the middle aged, while deaths among young people and the very old were relatively higher, possibly due to rising rates of obesity and diabetes.

Once the results have been adjusted to take account of age, the reduction in deaths from heart attacks stood at about a third during the decade.

'Still work to be done': Charity

Despite the recent improvements, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) said there was still much work to be done to reduce the number of heart attacks and deaths still further.

Professor Peter Weissberg, medical director at the BHF, which funded the study, said in a statement: "This impressive fall in death rates is due partly to prevention of heart attacks by better management of risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure and cholesterol and due partly to better treatment of heart attack patients when they reach hospital.

"But far too many heart attack victims still die from a cardiac arrest before medical help arrives. Many of these deaths could be prevented by rapid Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR). Our message is simple: ‘hands-only’ CPR, as shown by Vinnie Jones, could save many more lives in the future."