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Flu Shots Are a Bargain in Preventing
Heart Attacks,
Say UT Cardiologists
The relatively cheap and readily available flu shot should be recommended more often as a precaution against heart attacks and strokes, say University of Texas Medical School at Houston cardiologists. Their call for large-scale clinical studies and expansion of current guidelines for vaccinations against influenza appeared in November in Circulation, the leading journal of the American Heart Association.
“We are alerting the medical community to the importance of flu vaccination in patients with heart disease,” said lead author Mohammad Madjid, M.D., an assistant professor in the cardiology division of the Medical School. “The vaccination rate for these patients is notoriously low (around 30 percent) and much lower than the national average of 60 percent.”
A review of numerous studies suggested that influenza may cause up to 91,000 deaths per year by triggering heart attacks and strokes, much higher than the accepted belief that flu causes only 20,000 deaths per year. Annually, 729,000 deaths result from strokes and heart disease.
A team led by S. Ward Casscells III, M.D., who is the UT Health Science Center at Houston’s vice president for biotechnology, the John Edward Tyson Distinguished Professor of Medicine and a professor of cardiology at the Medical School, pioneered research on the link between flu and fatal heart attacks. Their data suggested influenza may be four times more deadly than previous estimates showed. Studies by other scientists have shown that flu vaccinations reduce heart attack risk by 50 to 67 percent and halve the risk of stroke.
“Our work has pulled together disparate studies and examined the evidence in toto to show that the influenza vaccine is much more cost-effective than many cardiovascular interventions and should be routinely recommended by physicians,” Casscells said.
“We also are trying to raise awareness of the protective effect of vaccinating children to prevent flu and its cardiovascular complications in their parents who have heart disease,” Madjid said. “New intranasal vaccines like FluMist, which was introduced this year for children, may be of particular benefit when we’re facing a bad flu season.”
The authors also called on the American Heart Association, European Society of Cardiology, American College of Cardiology and other cardiovascular disease groups to fully adopt current federal flushot guidelines that recommend the vaccine to all people older than 50 and everyone with heart disease.
“The flu vaccination is just not used often enough,” Madjid said. He pointed out that, because vaccination rates are lowest among the less affluent and minorities, local and federal education programs should target those groups – perhaps offering financial incentives for getting flu shots.
“Flu not only disproportionately afflicts uninsured, unvaccinated minorities, but it also may be a smokescreen that can delay diagnosis of newer respiratory diseases like SARS,” Casscells said.
In addition to Madjid and Casscells, other authors of the Circulation article were Morteza Naghavi, M.D., assistant professor of cardiology at the UT Medical School, and Silvio Litovsky, M.D., senior research scientist for the Vascular Cell Biology Laboratory at Texas Heart Institute.
The team’s work was partly supported by the U.S. Army’s Disaster Relief and Emergency Medical Services (DREAMS) grant.
— by David Bates, Public Affairs