A new international study on the causes of heart attacks involved over 9 million adults from the United States and South Korea. The authors of the research concluded that 99% of heart attacks, strokes, and episodes of heart failure were triggered by at least one of four classic risk factors. The findings were published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC).
These four key risk factors identified by experts include hypertension, elevated cholesterol and blood sugar levels, as well as smoking. Together, they preceded 99% of all cardiovascular events. Even in the lowest-risk group—women under 60 years of age—this figure exceeded 95%.
Among these precursors, hypertension proved to be the most common: 93% of patients who experienced a cardiovascular disaster had high blood pressure, both in the United States and in Korea. Cardiologists from Northwestern University emphasize that the combination of two or more factors poses a particularly serious danger.
The authors also addressed the popular notion of increasingly frequent “unexplained” heart attacks in recent years. They are convinced that risk factors exist in these cases as well, but they were less pronounced, or the individual simply overlooked them and did not undergo medical examinations.
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