medwireNews { August 29, 2012
The earthquake and tsunami that devastated parts of eastern Japan in 2011 led to a significantly increased weekly occurrence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the months after the event, study findings show.
Hiroaki Shimokawa (Tohoku University, Japan) said that although such effects of natural disasters have been reported before, previously only short-term individual CVD events have been described, whereas his team's study involved a large population sample, longer follow-up period, and analyzed all major forms of CVD...
...Shimokawa reported at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Munich, Germany, that in 2008, 3 years before the Japan earthquake struck, the incidence of confirmed CVD diagnosis in the Miyagi prefecture was 17,000. This number increased to 20,000 diagnoses in 2011.
The number of weekly cases of heart failure (HF) increased significantly from 25 on March 4, 2011 to 56 on the day the earthquake hit, corresponding to a rise of 37.5% on the number of weekly cases in March 2008.
The number of weekly cases of acute coronary syndrome increased significantly from 14 in the week before the earthquake to 18 on the day of the earthquake, stroke from 65 to 118, all-cause cardio-pulmonary arrest (CPA) from 44 to 80, and CPA (cardio-pulmonary cause) from 40 to 62. The number of weekly pneumonia cases also increased from 46 to 88 on the day of the earthquake.
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earthquake damage heart by khouryp23, on Flickr
