Take a look at the screen-grab above, from Google News earliter this morning. The top, Reuters headline (?One in 12 in military has clogged heart arteries?) sounded about right to me ??a high percentage of modern soldiers with clogged arteries, another sign of the increasingly poor health?of U.S. youth.?But then I noticed the headline underneath, from the New York Times: ?Heart Disease in Military Shows Steep Drop Since Korean War.? It seems this study contains surprisingly good news, or at least news of improvement, because circa the early 1950s, eight out of 12 members of the U.S. military showed signs of heart disease.
Surprised that today?s military members have significantly better heart health than they did 60 years ago? So was I. So were researchers. According to the NYT article, the study authors expected that the rise in obesity and Type 2 diabetes ? especially among young people ? would have led to increased prevalence of heart disease in the military.
So what gives??Maybe the fact that today?s GIs aren?t putting back a pack of Lucky Strikes or two daily.
National declines in hypertension and high cholesterol also helped, the study authors say.
While obesity and diabetes dominate the public health discussion today, other cardiovascular risk factors, like high cholesterol and uncontrolled high blood pressure, have been falling for decades. And between 1980 and 2000, smoking rates among service members fell by 40 percent.
In the early 1950s, when pathologists reviewed autopsies and medical records from Korean War service members killed in combat, they found 77% had ?coronary atherosclerosis,? a hardening and narrowing of the coronary arteries.
?The finding that so many seemingly healthy men in their late teens and 20s had significant buildup of plaques in the arteries shattered the perception of heart disease as purely an affliction of older people, revealing that the disease had a silent and relatively early onset,? notes the Times.
Research carried out during the Vietnam War era found about half of soldiers had signs of clogged arteries. In the new study, researchers looked at autopsies and medical records from service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011. Overall, only 8.5% had some degree of coronary atherosclerosis.
Severe heart disease among military members has also declined: 15% of the Korean War soldiers, 5% of the Vietnam soldiers and just 2.3% of today?s troops showed signs of severe coronary atherosclerosis.
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