Health & Medicine

Ontario Notices a Drop in Heart Failure by 33 Percent

Brooke Miller
First Posted: Aug 26, 2012 01:57 PM EDT

Efforts to fight against the chronic heart disease are showing amazing results among the citizens of Ontario. A new study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal states that the number of new heart failure in Ontario has noticed a decline of 33 percent.

The team that came out with this finding was led by Jack Tu from the institute of Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) in Toronto, the Schulich Heart Centre, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and the University of Toronto. They examined the heart failure trends in Ontario from 1997 to 2997 in a large study population that involved nearly 419,551 incident cases of heart failure of which 216,190 requiring admission to hospital and the remaining 203,361 were considered as outpatients at the time of initial diagnosis.

The researchers noticed that nearly 80 percent of the total number of cases was registered by patients of age 65 and older. These older people complained of other diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure.

Also the mortality rates have seen a dip from 35.7 percent to 33.8 percent amongst the inpatients whereas the outpatients noticed a decline from 17.7 percent to 16.2 percent for outpatients.

Medicalnewstoday quoted Tu saying, "We saw a 32.7 percent decline in the incidence of heart failure cases in Ontario between 1997 and 2007, which translates to a 3 percent average annual decline; this is similar to the rates of decline previously observed in overall cardiovascular disease mortality and incidence of ischemic heart disease events in Canada.

Huffingtonpost quoted Tu saying, "Drops in smoking rates and better hypertension control are likely factors that have affected the number of new cases in Ontario."

"Younger Canadians are the generation most at risk now. It's a mixture of good news and bad news. The good news is the frequency of heart failure is declining significantly. The bad news is, for those who do develop heart failure, the prognosis is still quite poor." as reported by Tu in Huffingtonpost.

Medicalnewstoday quoted the authors saying, "Hypertension is the second most important cause of heart failure and other studies have shown that Ontario has one of the highest rates of blood pressure control in recent years, which may also contribute to fewer patients with incident heart failure. Although the results of our study are encouraging, the population continues to age and risk factors for heart failure such as diabetes and obesity are increasing, particularly in young people, which may cause the downward trend in incidence of heart failure to plateau or reverse."

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