heart attack in the united states

The United States has a higher heart attack mortality rate than other high-income countries

Galveston campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch

Although American hospitals have cutting-edge technology and low readmission rates when it comes to treating heart attacks, the country’s death rate is among the highest among the countries studied.

Despite international agreement on how heart attacks should be handled, the study published in The BMJ on May 4 found significant disparities in care for heart attack patients across six high-income nations.

“No health care system seemed to be excelling in every aspect of heart attack care,” according to one of the study’s authors, Dr. Peter Cram, is a professor and chair of internal medicine at the University of Texas Medical Center at Galveston.

The International Health System Research Collaborative was created by Cram and Harvard associate Dr. Bruce Landon to examine treatment and results across high-income countries. They looked at data from patients aged 66 and up who were admitted to a hospital with a heart attack between 2011 and 2017 in six high-income nations.

The United States, Canada, England, the Netherlands, Israel, and Taiwan were the countries they compared. These countries were chosen by the researchers because they all have well-developed healthcare systems and readily available administrative data, but they differ in terms of funding, organization, and overall performance in worldwide rankings.

The researchers focused on heart attacks since it is a common ailment with well-established worldwide diagnostic criteria and widespread agreement on evidence-based therapies that is easy to track with readily available data.

While the United States performed well in cardiac revascularization treatments and had low hospital readmission rates, the death rate in the United States and Taiwan was greater than other countries and “concerningly high,” according to Cram.

“The U.S. seems to focus really hard on those technologically advanced new and shiny things,” he said. “Maybe, from a policy perspective, we should focus more on the mortality rate instead of getting people in and out of the hospital.”

England and the Netherlands, by contrast, appeared to have lower mortality but much lower revascularization rates.

“It seems to be about tradeoffs,” Cram stated.  “Israel really seemed to be an exception, the only country that really seemed to perform well across all measures.”

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