When someone has a heart attack or a stroke, specialized care can give them the best chance of surviving.
But when it comes to preventing those problems in the first place, most essential care happens in general primary care clinics, a new study suggests. Or it doesn’t happen at all, if someone can’t, won’t or doesn’t take the time to see a primary care doctor or nurse practitioner.
The study finds that a majority of people with any of these key measures for improving and maintaining cardiovascular health, and the majority of those taking medication to control four of those measures, saw only a primary care clinician in the past year, compared with those who saw a cardiologist alone or in addition to seeing a primary care provider.
The study focuses on seven of what the American Heart Association calls “Life’s Essential Eight” controllable risk factors for cardiovascular disease: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, very high body mass index, tobacco use, low exercise and sleep problems such as insomnia. The data source used in the study doesn’t include information about the eighth risk factor, healthy food intake.
The study also finds that large percentages of people with these major cardiovascular risk factors didn’t see either type of health care provider in the past year, even if they said they were taking medications to control their blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar or stop smoking.
More than 50% of all tobacco users, 44% of those who say they have low levels of physical activity, and 38% of those with severe obesity said they hadn’t seen a primary care provider or cardiologist in the last year. Even among those taking medication to control cardiovascular risk factors, 15% to 20% said they hadn’t seen any provider in the past year.
The study is published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes by a team from Michigan Medicine, the University of Michigan’s academic medical center, OhioHealth, and Weill Cornell Medicine.
They used data from more than 66,000 adults interviewed in-depth about their health and healthcare in the last year, through the nationally representative Medical Expenditure Panel Survey conducted by the federal government.
