Recession causes 2,000 heart attack deaths

By Rebecca Smith, Medical Editor

 

Since 2002 the number of people dying from heart attacks in England has dropped by half, the study conducted by Oxford University found.

 

But within that, regional data revealed there was a 'blip' in London that corresponded to the financial crash in 2008 and continued through 2009.

 

Heart attack deaths have dropped due to better prevention of heart attacks in the first place with fewer people smoking and improvements in diet through lower consumption of saturated fat.

 

The treatment of people who do suffer a heart attack has also improved leading to fewer deaths with faster ambulance response times, new procedures to clear blocked arteries and wider use of drugs such as statins and aspirin.

 

The research published in the British Medical Journal showed around 80,000 lives have been saved between 2002 and 2008 as deaths from heart attacks declined.

 

 

Lead author Kate Smolina of Oxford University said extra data not included in the BMJ paper showed the steady decline in heart attacks stalled in London in 2008 and 2009 and then began dropping again.

 

She calculated this stalling resulted in 2,000 extra lives lost that would not have been had the decline continued.

 

The research paper said: "Our study provides further evidence that the drivers behind declining mortality rates differ geographically and that results specific to one region cannot necessarily be applied to other regions.

 

"The increase in acute myocardial infarction event rate in London between 2007 and 2009 may be a result of the financial crisis that peaked in 2008 and greatly affected the London financial district. As a result, the reductions in case fatality accounted for most of the decline in deaths from acute myocardial infarction in that region during the 2000s."

 

Dr Smolina, who conducted the research as part of her doctoral thesis, told the Daily Telegraph: "I would say that there were approximately 2,000 "lives lost" during the years 2008 and 2009.

 

"There was not necessarily a peak in the data, but rather a constant decline between 2002 and 2007, a plateau for 2008 and 2009, and then a decline again.

 

"It is our speculation that these extra 2,000 deaths can likely be explained by the crisis, but we cannot make any conclusions before doing further research."

 

Prof Peter Weissberg, medical director of the British Heart Foundation which funded the study said the observation was interesting but from this study, the deaths could not be definitively attributed to the financial crisis.

 

He said: "We know that after the latest San Francisco earth quake there was a blip in heart attacks in the weeks afterwards followed by a drop in the months and years afterwards suggesting that it may have brought forward a heart attack that would have happened later.

 

"It is a biologically plausible explanation but we cannot say from this study that there is a cause an effect. Other things may have happened to explain this." Telegraph