New Data Points to Reduction in Decrease of Coronary Artery Disease

The decrease in coronary artery disease may be a thing of the past, if new autopsy data from Minnesota is to be believed. Coronary artery disease had been on a slide for at least a decade now, and the new data is certainly not good news for doctors as well as patients. According to the new data, the decrease in coronary artery disease ended possibly in 1995 itself.

The above news was part of a report in the February 11, 2008 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine by the Mayo Clinic’s Cynthia L. Leibson, Ph.D., and her colleagues. The report is based on the coronary anatomy grading from the autopsies of 425 residents of Olmsted County between 1981 and 2004. All the subjects of the study had non-natural causes of death.

According to the report, while there may have been temporal reductions in the incidence of coronary artery disease during that entire time period, the reduction may have stopped as long back as 1995.

The report further states that studies have indicated the incidence of coronary disease in the left circumflex artery after 2000 has not just stopped; in fact, there has been a reversal in this regard, with more people reportedly suffering from it.

In the report, the team wrote, “The finding that temporal declines in the grade of coronary artery disease at autopsy have ended, together with suggestive evidence that declines have recently reversed, provides some of the first data to support increasing concerns that declines in heart disease mortality may not continue.”

Between 1981 and 2004, 3,237 people from Olmsted County aged between 16 and 64 years died, of which 515 deaths were due to accidents, homicides, suicides, and undetermined causes. 63% of these were men, and the mean age at the time of death was 50.

Of these deaths, 96% were subjected to autopsies. 425 of these autopsies also covered pathology grading of coronary artery disease in the left anterior descending artery, the left circumflex artery, the left main artery, and the right coronary artery.

This data brings into the picture the possibility of coronary artery disease occurring from a younger age in the future, which could bring with it an increase in the death rate, according to an editorial by the University of Illinois, Chicago’s S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D., and Victoria Persky, M.D., which was published along with the study.

The team that conducted the study has said more studies would have to be conducted to find out if there was any influence of the two major diseases that have reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. – obesity and diabetes mellitus – on the trends identified during the course of the study.