Welcome to InCirculation.net
InCirculation.net is a professional cardiovascular resource intended for a global audience of specialists, generalists, researchers, and other healthcare professionals
Cardiovascular news provides daily news updates to help you stay informed.
Canadian CV deaths drop overall but proportion in women rises
25 June 2009
MedWire News: Hospital admission and death rates for cardiovascular disease (CVD) dropped by almost a third in Canada over the course of a decade, research shows, but by the start of this century more women than men were dying from the condition.
The high CVD burden in women points to a need for increased investment in education and research, say the researchers.
They note that both the American Heart Association and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada have started public campaigns aimed at better informing women about the risk factors and symptoms of CVD.
The team, led by Jack Tu from the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto, Ontario, used national databases to examine Canadian trends in death and hospital admissions relating to acute myocardial infarction (AMI), heart failure (HF), and stroke between 1994 and 2004.
The age- and gender-standardized rate of death from CVD declined 30.0% during the study period, from 360.6 to 252.5 per 100,000 of the population aged 20 years and over, representing an average annual rate of decline of 2.7%.
Over the same period, rates of AMI fell 38.1%, HF by 23.5%, and stroke by 28.2%.
The age- and gender-standardized rate of hospital admission decreased by 27.6% for stroke and 27.2% for HF but by just 9.2% for AMI.
Conversely, the relative decline for in-hospital case-fatality rate was greatest for AMI at 33.1%, compared with 8.1% for HF and 8.9% for stroke.
In 1994, 50.7% of CV deaths were in men, but by 2000 they were overtaken by women, who accounted for 50.5% by 2004.
Despite otherwise positive results, the researchers warn that “these findings are not grounds for complacency.”
Reporting in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, they say: “CVD continues to be the leading cause of death and reason for hospital admission in Canada.”
