Heart Disease Apple Falls Close to Tree
Reported September 10, 2007
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — Have a close family member who suffers from heart disease? Then you might be at significantly higher risk for the condition yourself.
British researchers arrived at that conclusion after reviewing previous studies on heart disease and how it runs in families. One study, for example, revealed 48 percent of all heart disease events and 72 percent of all premature deaths from heart disease occurred in 14 percent of families with a history of heart disease.
Tapping into these findings to provide better preventive services to people with a family history of the condition could markedly improve treatment and survival for heart conditions, according to study authors. They report screening and treating middle-aged adults with relatives who have been diagnosed with heart disease could prevent 42 percent of all premature heart attacks and 8 percent of heart attacks overall.
The authors note several sets of guidelines recommend screening first-degree relatives of people with heart disease — mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters — but such screening rarely takes place in clinical practice. In one study conducted at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Md., among 859 siblings of 490 heart disease patients, siblings actually had a lower awareness of high blood pressure — a key risk factor for heart disease — and how to treat it than members of the general population. In another U.S. study involving more than 5,000 heart disease patients, less than 1 percent had discharge plans calling for family members to be screened, and only 20 percent had family members screened within six months of the patient’s initial hospital stay.
“First degree relatives are an obvious, but neglected, group at which primary prevention should be targeted,” conclude the study authors.
SOURCE: British Medical Journal, 2007;335:481-485