Heart Care Comes Up Short
Reported May 30, 2008
(Ivanhoe Newswire) Two new studies suggest doctors could do a better job when it comes to caring for the heart.
European researchers who surveyed doctors on how they treat heart failure found too many physicians are ignoring medical evidence. The problem was worse among primary care physicians and internists/geriatricians. However, even cardiologists or doctors who specialize in heart care too often didnt follow the guidelines. For example, only 32-percent of cardiologists reported using standard guidelines as their main source of treatment information.
The guidelines include recommendations such as referring older patients to a specialist, prescribing ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers to heart failure patients and prescribing the most appropriate treatment when symptoms get worse.
The second study looked at the role cholesterol-lowering drugs, called statins, play in helping heart surgery patients. Researchers combined the results of 19 previous studies, finding about half the patients received statins prior to surgery. Overall, patients who received these drugs had about 43-percent lower odds of dying than those who didnt.
When you consider that only about 40-50 percent of heart patients admitted for cardiac surgery receive statins, and even fewer patients achieve sufficient lipid-levels prior to surgery and in compliance with existing European and American guidelines, our report underlines the need to change current clinical practice for both the cardiologist and cardiac surgeon, who are primarily responsible for providing optimal peri-operative care for our cardiac patients, said study author Dr. Oliver Liakopoulos.
SOURCE: European Heart Journal, published online May 27, 2008