March 25, 2016 – Surviving Heart Attack

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Anchor lead: Physical fitness may help you survive a heart attack, Elizabeth Tracey reports

People who have a history of physical activity are more likely to survive a heart attack than those without, a retrospective study led by Michael Blaha, a preventive cardiologist at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues has found.

Blaha: We found that physical fitness levels measured years before people went on the have heart attacks were predictive of how well one would survive that heart attack.  This has implications for higher risk patients, for example who have family histories, who have plaque in their arteries.  We can tell them that exercise and achieving a high physical fitness level now not only helps ward off heart attacks, if one were to go on to have a heart attack, predicts decreased mortality after that heart attack and decreased disability after their heart attack.   :30

Blaha says its important to understand how to avoid death and disability relative to heart attacks as heart disease remains the number one cause of death worldwide.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.