Pharmacy Daily | Baby boomer risk

IMPROVING patient medicines compliance is a key factor in dealing with the massive potential risk of heart attack or stroke among baby boomers in Australia. That’s one of the findings of a report released in Sydney this morning, which found that one in five Australians aged over 55 has at least a 30% likelihood of suffering a potentially fatal cardiovascular incident in the next five years. The Access Economics report, sponsored by Boehringer Ingelheim, has renamed baby boomers as ‘Generation Risk’ after ranking people in this age group on a scale similar to the one used for bushfire warnings, based on an accumulation of risk factors such as being overweight, smoking or high blood pressure. Almost half of all Australians aged 55 or older fall into the high risk end of the scale, facing at least a 15% chance of a heart attack or stroke in the next five years. The report found that on average 20% of people stop taking blood pressure medications after just one month, while 80% had stopped taking them after 30 months. “The analysis revealed that the risk of a ‘catastrophic’ cardiovascular event could be reduced by up to 22 per cent if these patients continued with therapy,” said expert adviser on the report, Prof Murray Esler of Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute. The study also found that men were almost twice as likely as women to be at ‘high’, ‘very high’, ‘severe’ or ‘extreme’ risk of a heart attack or stroke, and were also more likely to have already suffered a cardiovascular event.

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