From today"s SMH.Surely Intelliheart/Cardanal are the right...

From today"s SMH.

Surely Intelliheart/Cardanal are the right tools...Hoping IMI personnel will capatalaize accordingly.

"Risks for heart disease go unchecked
Email Printer friendly version Normal font Large font Julie Robotham Medical Editor
September 15, 2008


A GROUP of the country's most-respected specialist doctors has called on the Federal Government to overhaul the way heart disease is assessed and treated, after analysis found at least 500,000 high-risk people may be missing out on medicines that could protect them.

Overreliance on measures such as checking for high cholesterol and blood pressure levels was hampering the identification of people whose disease risk was greatly elevated because of a combination of other factors such as advancing age, male sex and smoking, said Andrew Tonkin, the study leader.

He found cholesterol-lowering drugs had not been prescribed to more than 80 per cent of people judged to have a 15 per cent or greater risk of having a heart attack, stroke or other form of heart disease over the next five years.

Professor Tonkin, a cardiologist and head of the Cardiovascular Research Unit at Monash University, said although the results were based on re-analysis of the last national disease risk survey - conducted in 2000 - it was still "almost certainly true there is undertreatment of people at high risk, people who have some [risk] factors that are non-modifiable, like age and sex."

The analysis found healthy men's risk of developing heart disease was more than three times as great as women's. But for both sexes the chance of having a first heart attack or other dangerous circulatory problem in the following five years escalated dramatically through middle age, quadrupling for men between their 40s and 60s and increasing tenfold for women.

"We tend to think of people as having high cholesterol, or not; having high blood pressure, or not. That is spurious," Professor Tonkin said.

Only about a quarter of heart attacks or strokes occurred in people with the highest cholesterol levels, while the bulk of heart attacks and strokes were attributable to "the interplay and intensity of risk factors".

In total, 717,000 Australians without diabetes or heart disease fell into the high-risk category, the research found. But only about a quarter of them had started taking the so-called statin drugs, such as Lipitor and Zocor.

The study, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia, was co-authored by medical advisers from the Heart Foundation, National Stroke Foundation, Diabetes Australia and Kidney Health Australia. The groups are developing guidelines to help doctors consider multiple factors when deciding whether to prescribe the medicines, which are already the most widely prescribed in Australia - costing the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme more than $1 billion a year