The results of a new study led by Greek scientists. Because patients do not know their condition.
One in four healthy adults over the age of 60 have valvular heart disease but don’t know it, according to a new study in Britain.
The main reasons for this are that they do not have any suspicious symptoms, they do not have any problems with the cardiovascular system, while apparently they do not consult a cardiologist out of precaution.
Valvular heart disease develops when one or more heart valves do not work properly. This can strain the heart and increase the risk of heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascular events.
Heart valve disease is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Its frequency increases with age, as the valves undergo anatomical and functional degeneration.
But as life expectancy increases, so do the elderly. So the same thing happens with the number of patients, the researchers write in the medical journal European Heart Journal Cardiovascular Imaging.
Research
However, they add, it is not known how many people have undiagnosed valvular heart disease. To this end, they invited randomly selected volunteers aged 60 and over to participate in their study.
4237 healthy men and women without heart disease or suspicious symptoms were included. The researchers found this by examining their hearts with ultrasound 28.2% had problems with one or more valves. More analytically:
- 13.8% had problems with the tricuspid heart valve
- 12.8% had mitral valve problems
- 8.3% in the aortic valve
Most of these patients had a mild problem. However 2.4% had clinically significant valvular diseasenamely moderate (2.2%) and severe (0.2%).
The role of age
“We conducted our study to determine how widespread heart valve problems are in healthy, asymptomatic adults,” he said. supervising researcher Dr. Vassilis Vassiliou Professor of Cardiology, University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich.
“Our data showed that the main factor associated with these heart problems is age. This means that the older a person is, the higher the probability of serious heart valve problems.”