The American Heart Association released its Heart Disesase and Stroke Statistics 2019 Update on Jan. 31, which said nearly half of Americans have a cardiovascular disease.
These new statistics align with data found in research from Professor of Medicine and Director of the Program on Health and Clinical Informatics, Samuel Cykert, who has developed a project to combat cardiovascular risk in North Carolina.
Forty-eight percent of Americans have some kind of cardiovascular disease, which includes coronary heart disease, heart failure, stroke and high blood pressure. The high percentage was partly caused by the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology hypertension changing the definition of high blood pressure from 140/90 mm Hg to 130/80 mm Hg. However, the Association still warns that the overall heart health of Americans is still decreasing, paralleling Cykert's findings.
Cykert developed Heart Health Now!, a project that combats cardiovascular disease in North Carolina by teaching small primary care practices to assess their patient’s cardiovascular risk using data.
“We were able to extract data from their electronic health records to assign risk to all their patients between ages 40 and 79 with something called the ASCVD risk score,” Cykert said.
Cykert said they were able to rank patients in the practice from highest risk to lowest risk and list the methods of rapidly reducing risk next to each patient on a dashboard.
Cykert’s team recommended no tobacco use, blood pressure control, exercise and varied versions of the Mediterranean Diet, which emphasizes eating primarily plant-based foods, for all patients.
“Communities, schools and public health, in addition to medical practices should push on stopping tobacco use, the (Mediterranean diet) and physical activity as a way to live,” Cykert said.
The American Heart Association’s report said some of the most significant improvements in risk reduction are declining U.S. smoking rates and increasing U.S. exercise rates.
