Heart attack rates drop sharply

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37603300/ns/health-heart_health/

By Gene Emery
updated 2 hours, 12 minutes ago

BOSTON - Heart attack rates fell 24 percent in California between 2000 and 2008, probably because of better care, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

The study, in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first large survey since the adoption of new treatments and medicines for preventing heart attacks. It examined more than 46,000 heart attack hospitalizations.

Dr. Robert Yeh of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues said the 24 percent drop was seen even though doctors can better detect heart attacks and despite the growing rates of diabetes and obesity, both of which raise the risk of heart attack.

"We would expect an increase in heart attacks because we're picking up more heart attacks than we used to," Yeh said in a telephone interview. "We found that, despite that, they are still going down."

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