Cardiac lessons often ignored

Medical research has revealed enough about the causes and prevention of heart attacks that they could be nearly eliminated. Yet nearly 16 million Americans are living with coronary heart disease, and nearly half a million die from it each year.

It's not that prevention does not work. In fact, said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, age-adjusted death rates for heart disease dropped precipitously in the past few decades, and prevention and better treatment are major reasons why.

But the concern, Nabel and others say, is that much more could be done. In many ways, scientists' hard-won and increasingly detailed understanding of what causes heart disease and what to do for it often goes unknown or ignored.

Studies reveal, for example, that people have only about an hour to get their arteries open during a heart attack if they are to avoid permanent heart damage. Yet, recent surveys find, fewer than 10 percent get to a hospital that fast, sometimes because they are reluctant to acknowledge what is happening. And most who reach the hospital quickly do not receive the optimal treatment — many American hospitals are not fully equipped to provide it but are reluctant to give up heart patients because they are so profitable.

And new studies reveal that even though drugs can protect people who already had a heart attack from having another, many patients get the wrong doses, and most stop taking the drugs in a matter of months. They should take the drugs for the rest of their lives.

The result, heart researchers say, is a huge disconnect between what is possible and what is actually happening.

The golden hour

Cardiologists call it the golden hour, that window of time when they have a chance to save most of the heart muscle when an artery is blocked.

But that urgency, cardiologists say, has been one of the most difficult messages to get across, in part because people often deny or fail to appreciate the symptoms of a heart attack. The popular image of a heart attack is all wrong.

It's the Hollywood heart attack, said Dr. Eric Peterson, a cardiologist and heart disease researcher at Duke University.

"That's the man clutching his chest, grimacing in pain and going down," Peterson said. "That's what people imagine a heart attack is like. What they don't imagine is that it's not so much pain as pressure, a feeling of heaviness, shortness of breath."