Morning Read: Elderly suffering fewer heart attacks

Highlights of the important and interesting from the world of health care:

Good news from the front line in the battle against cardiovascular disease: The heart-attack rate among elderly Americans appears to be falling sharply, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The rate of hospital admissions for heart attack was 23% lower in 2007 than in 2002, according to a just-published analysis of Medicare data, with 228,170 fee-for-service Medicare patients admitted in 2007 compared with 297,653 in 2002. That suggests there were nearly 87,000 fewer heart-attack admissions in 2007 than would have been expected had the rate remained constant.

The report covers only the nearly 30 million Medicare beneficiaries in the traditional fee-for-service part of the federal health-care program for the elderly. If the findings are extrapolated based on 38 million Medicare participants, including those enrolled in so-called Medicare Advantage managed-care plans, researchers estimate a 2007 total of 319,063 heart-attack admissions, representing a reduction of 97,000 versus comparable figures in 2002.

“It’s remarkable what has been accomplished,” says Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale University School of Medicine and principal investigator for the study. He terms the rapid decline in a major public health marker as “breathtaking.”

Here we go again For the first time since leaving medical school, many doctors are having to take tests to renew board certification in their fields, 147 specialties from dermatology to obstetrics, according to the Associated Press.

Any doctor can deliver a baby, treat cancer, or advertise as a cardiologist. Certification means the doctor had special training in that field and passed an exam to prove knowledge of it.

Doctors used to passed exams and be certified for life, but that changed in the 1990s. Doctors certified since then must retest every 6 to 10 years to prove their skills haven’t gone stale.

For some specialists, like the doctors who push tubes into heart arteries to unclog blockages, this is the first year many are going through retesting.

Older doctors also are feeling the heat. More than a quarter of a million of them were ’grandfathered’’ with lifetime certificates, but are being urged to retest voluntarily to show they still know their stuff.

Oxycontin abusers, take note. The Food and Drug Administration said Monday it had approved a new formulation of controlled-release OxyContin that makes the powerful pain drug harder to abuse, according to Reuters.

OxyContin, made by Purdue Pharma, is attractive to drug abusers because it contains large quantities of a potent opioid pain killer, oxycodone.

The reformulated OxyContin is intended to prevent the opioid medication from being cut, broken, chewed, crushed or dissolved to release more medication, thereby potentially decreasing the risk of overdose that could result from tampering.

The new formulation will most likely result in less abuse by inhaling or injection, but it still can be abused or misused by ingesting larger doses than are recommended, the F.D.A. said.

Morning Read: Elderly suffering fewer heart attacks

Thomas Lee

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