# Has the survival rate of heart attacks (acute myocardial infarctions) increased significantly?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-survival-rate-of-heart-attacks-acute-myocardial-infarctions-increased-significantly/837175
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [July 16, 2019, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-survival-rate-of-heart-attacks-acute-myocardial-infarctions-increased-significantly/837175 "2019-07-16T16:25:51Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)
#### Post date: [July 16, 2019, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-survival-rate-of-heart-attacks-acute-myocardial-infarctions-increased-significantly/837175/1 "2019-07-16T16:25:51Z")
[This link](https://www.medscape.com/answers/155919-15097/what-is-the-prognosis-of-acute-myocardial-infarction-mi-heart-attack) indicates an overall 30% mortality rate, with 50% of the deaths occurring before arrival at a hospital.
Any info as to how that would have compared to maybe 50 or so years ago?
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### Author:  [@Happy\_Lendervedder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Happy_Lendervedder)
#### Post date: [July 16, 2019, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-survival-rate-of-heart-attacks-acute-myocardial-infarctions-increased-significantly/837175/2 "2019-07-16T16:29:56Z")
Need answer fast?
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### Author:  [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)
#### Post date: [July 16, 2019, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-survival-rate-of-heart-attacks-acute-myocardial-infarctions-increased-significantly/837175/3 "2019-07-16T16:51:46Z")
According to this[link\*](https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/surviving-a-heart-attack-a-success-story), yes. Although it gives substantially different numbers than you give in terms of survival rates (yours seem unusually low to me).
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### Author:  [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)
#### Post date: [July 16, 2019, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-survival-rate-of-heart-attacks-acute-myocardial-infarctions-increased-significantly/837175/4 "2019-07-16T16:58:56Z")
ETA: Looking more closely I think the numbers in my link refer to survival after reaching the hospital so that might be the discrepancy.
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### Author:  [@Treppenwitz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Treppenwitz)
#### Post date: [July 16, 2019, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-survival-rate-of-heart-attacks-acute-myocardial-infarctions-increased-significantly/837175/5 "2019-07-16T18:24:24Z")
From the UK - this is the most interesting thing that came up.
In this [study summary](https://www.nhs.uk/news/2012/01January/Pages/heart-attack-death-rate-reduction.aspx) (link to [BMJ paper](https://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.d8059)) it is stated that
> [@](#):
>
> The researchers found that from 2002-10 in England, 840,175 people of all ages were admitted to hospital with heart attack or died suddenly from a heart attack. Some 61% of heart attack patients were men, and 39% were women. The main findings are listed below:
>
> During this period the mortality rate from heart attacks fell by 50% in men and by 53% in women when the results were ‘age standardised’, i.e. adjusted to account for the changing age structure of the population.
and
> [@](#):
>
> They point out that just over half the decline in deaths from heart attacks over the period can be attributed to a fall in people experiencing heart attacks and just under half to improved survival rates when people did experience a heart attack.
From the study report:
> [@](#):
>
> We have shown that the decline in the acute myocardial infarction event rate and one month case fatality in the United Kingdom,\*\* observed in previous decades, continued into the 21st century\*\*.
My bolding - but there was no cite for this, annoyingly, so we don’t know to what extent survival of a heart attack is reflected in this decline.
In any case, the source data here is pretty damn good and it is peer reviewed, even if the timescale is very limited - not the 50 years of the OP’s question.
Certainly thrombolytic drugs were around during the time of the study, but (from memory) publicly accessible defibrillators were pretty much unknown in the UK at the time.
j
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### Author:  [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)
#### Post date: [July 17, 2019, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-survival-rate-of-heart-attacks-acute-myocardial-infarctions-increased-significantly/837175/6 "2019-07-17T01:23:40Z")
> [@Treppenwitz](#):
>
> From the UK - this is the most interesting thing that came up.
> j
This was a really interesting situation for people interested in health care / medical insurance. For decades, poor survival from heart attacks was one of the markers of the UK medical system: people just expected that when you had a heart attack, you died, and it wasn’t an issue.
At the same time, expensive health care in the USA was giving much better survival rates. (And cardiac care was expensive too).
In Aus, this was one of the things that people pointed to when comparing the UK and USA health systems: the UK gave universal coverage, and treatment of simple problems of ordinary people was not only quite good, it was also handled in a organised, helpful, humane, friendly way, but people who were dying were just left to die: no particular effort was expended to extend or preserve life.
But the UK is spending a lot more money on it’s health scheme than it was 30 years ago, and improved survival from heart attack is one of the effects.