There is an urgent need for improved implementation of secondary prevention guidelines, as a large proportion of patients with ischemic heart disease remain suboptimally treated with lifestyle modifications and cardioprotective medications.
Persistent gaps in IHD risk factor control signal need for closer monitoring; leaves open effective strategies to align practice with secondary prevention guidelines.
Ischemic heart disease (IHD) remains a major cause of mortality, morbidity, and disability in the U.S. and other developed countries and is an emerging epidemic in developing countries. As a result of therapeutic and preventive measures to control the IHD pandemic, mortality has declined steadily during the last several decades with consequent gains in life expectancy; however, this decrease in mortality started to plateau in the 1990's.1,2 Secondary prevention is identifying and treating people with established disease and those at very high risk of developing ischemic heart disease, which involves the treatment and rehabilitation of patients with known ischemic heart disease to prevent future cardiovascular events, including myocardial infarction, stroke, and heart failure.
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Wong et al. (2010) studied this question.
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