Transcript: AHA spokesperson, Russell Luepker, MD, MS, FAHA, offers perspective offers perspective onthe top consumer news presented at the European Society of Cardiology 2016 inRome August 28, 2016. He is a Mayo Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, Division of Epidemiology and Community Health.
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Hi I'm Russell Luepker. I'm a Mayo Professor of Public Health, and Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota. And I'm here at the European Cardiology Society meetings looking at interesting abstracts that have been presented. One of them is from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and talks about the association of adverse outcomes among people who have had one heart attack associated with socioeconomic status. In Sweden it's certainly possible, because everyone's tracked, to find out these things.
And what they found was that you were at a higher risk if you had lower disposable income. And this is in a society where healthcare is provided equally for everyone. And income is considerably compressed compared to ours in the United States. And why should that be? Well they postulate that health habits and other issues in people with lower income and less education are more likely to not take care of themselves even if medicines and other treatments are readily available. For us at home, in the United States, we don't pay much attention to that at all even though we know that people who are poorer and less educated have much worse prognosis than those that are educated and affluent. And so I think that one of the take away messages here is that we taking care of patients need to be particularity sensitive and aware of the social and economic influences on our patients and how and if they take care of themselves after they've had a heart attack.
Another thing that I thought was really interesting and exciting, was a study from Finland. Looking at physical activity in older adults aged 65 to 74. And what they found is that those that continued to have exercise, moderate or more active exercise, had 50 percent lower episodes of cardiovascular disease. And I think this is particularly important for us now. As our population ages, we haven't paid enough attention to physical activity in older adults. Now we're all aware that many older adults have arthritis and other issues, but the things that Fins found were activities like four hours of gardening a week, walking moderate distances had a substantial beneficial effect. And I think as we think about our patients and worry about that their many illnesses and cardiovascular problems. We need to remember that regular physical activity helps people live longer and live better.