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(Ivanhoe Newswire) Too many people with heart disease are fooling themselves about their risk of having a heart attack.
A new study out of the University of California, San Francisco, finds 43 percent of high-risk people rate their risk at less than or about the same as other people their age. Men were worse at assessing their risk than women, as were those with less education, those who were older, and those who had not participated in a cardiac rehabilitation program.
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In reality, people with previous heart attacks or other signs of cardiovascular disease are five-to-seven times more likely to have a heart attack than those without these conditions.
The research was conducted among about 3,500 patients who had either had a heart attack already or had been treated for narrowed arteries. All were surveyed on heart disease knowledge and their perception of their own risk for a heart attack over the next five years.
Patients require continued reinforcement about the nature of cardiac symptoms, the benefits of early treatment and their risk status, write the investigators. They stress doctors need to do more to review heart attack symptoms and the actions to take when they occur with patients when they come in for regular checkups.
While the chances of surviving a heart attack are fairly good if someone is treated within an hour of developing symptoms, most people dont come in for care until two or three hours after symptoms begin. Common symptoms of heart attack include nausea and pain in the chest, left arm, or jaw.
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SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, 2008;168:1049-1054
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
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