"ANet United"

An alarming study was recently published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. It would appear that many existing heart patients know very little about heart health. In fact, nearly half of the coronary patients polled didn’t know the symptoms of a heart attack and didn’t realize that they are in a higher risk category for a heart attack.

Patients were given a list of possible heart attack symptoms, with 15 correct answers and 6 incorrect answers randomly listed. When asked to choose the correct symptoms on this test, almost half of all patients scored a grade under 70.

Of course, people who suffer from heart disease are five to seven times more likely to have a heart attack than people without coronary health problems. How is it that the average heart patient knows so little about his/her condition?

This is a widespread problem, unfortunately, amongst both heart patients and healthy patients. This is why people should become more involved with health advocacy, as ignorance is rampant where the subject is concerned.

The problem isn’t relegated to one area of the world, it seems, as this was an international medical study. Those polled included 3,522 patients from the United States, Australia and New Zealand. The complete study is available here.

This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who is an industry critic on the subject of lpn to rn degree. She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.

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