Sudden death a risk after heart attack

MINNEAPOLIS, Miss., Nov. 6 (UPI) -- Sudden cardiac death after a heart attack dropped in the past 30 years, but there's higher risk in the first month after a heart attack, U.S. researchers said.

Dr. A. Selcuk Adabag of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Minneapolis and colleagues at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., studied 2,997 residents -- average age 67, 59 percent men -- who had a heart attack in Olmsted County, Minn., from 1979 to 2005. Patients were tracked for about 4.7 years.

During the study period, 1,160 patients died, 24 percent from sudden cardiac death. The 30-day cumulative incidence of sudden cardiac death was 1.2 percent -- four times higher than expected.

For each following year, however, the rate of sudden cardiac death was constant at 1.2 percent per year -- lower than the rate among the general population. The cumulative five-year incidence of sudden cardiac death among heart attack patients was 6.9 percent.

A total of 842 patients developed recurrent ischemia -- in which blood flow to the heart muscle is decreased by a partial or complete blockage -- while 365 developed heart failure and 873 developed both.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, also found compared with patients who did not experience heart failure during follow-up, those who did had a 2.5 percent higher risk of sudden cardiac death within 30 days of heart attack and in each year thereafter.