Study debunks myth that 50 % of heart disease cases elude diagnosis

Chicago, Aug 20: Diet and lifestyle, not genetics or other factors, are the best tools for diagnosing and treating heart disease, according to a study.
The findings cast doubt on the long-standing theory that conventional risk factors are absent in half the cases of heart disease.
High cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking and diabetes have long been recognised as risk factors for the killer disease.
But some studies have suggested that those risk factors were missing in up to 50 per cent of coronary heart disease cases, fueling speculation that genetics, inflammation, or other factors could be partly responsible for the killer disease.
However, US researchers who reviewed three long-term studies involving more than 386,000 people with coronary heart disease reported that the overwhelming majority of them had one or more of the conventional risk factors.

Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Cleveland, Ohio, who reviewed the data on 122,458 patients reported that more than 80 per cent of them had at least one recognised risk factor.

"In fact, these risk factors are more important than originally thought," said Umesh Kot, a cardiologist formerly with the Cleveland clinic.

In an accompanying editorial, John Canto and Ami Iskandrian of the University of Alabama in Birmingham said that the findings had "enormous public health implications."
Bureau Report