As you’re no doubt well aware, heart attacks aren’t all alike—you hear stories of people struck with chest pain who make it to the hospital in plenty of time to get treatment, and then stories about people who suddenly keel over, never to get up again.
So what’s the difference between people who survive heart attacks and those who don’t? Researchers tackled this issue, in hopes of identifying people at higher risk of sudden cardiac death, and found that there are certain traits that make people less likely to survive an initial heart attack:
The research, which appears in the journal Heart, marks an important step in identifying which people are at higher risk of sudden cardiac death, which takes the lives of between 230,000 and 325,000 Americans each year. The researchers’ next task is determining what can be done to lower that risk.
Our next step in this path of research is to see if we can come up with a risk stratification score that can be applied to the general population, as well as to look at interventions that reverse the effect that these traits are having on susceptibility to sudden cardiac death,” said Elsayed Z. Soliman M.D., M.Sc., M.S., director of the Epidemiological Cardiology Research Center (EPICARE) at Wake Forest Baptist and lead author of the study said in a statement. “We need to know if lowering hypertension, BMI or resting heart rate would reduce the risk of dying suddenly.”
What this means for us: Even though more research is needed before the experts will make recommendations, it seems safe to say that getting blood pressure into a normal range and maintaining a healthy weight will reduce your chances of a fatal heart attack. Yes, we already knew that, but it’s good to have another reminder.
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