From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Thu Apr 17 2003 - 16:13:07 MDT
Ramez Naam wrote:
> From: Brian Atkins [mailto:brian@posthuman.com]
>
>>Ramez I was talking about a specific form of heart disease
>>(myocardial infarction, aka heart attack), not in general.
>
>
> Sorry, I should have caught that. Interesting. I'm tempted to say
> this is just a classification issue, with the likelihood of calling
> something a heart attack rising over time more quickly than the actual
> incidence of heart attacks. However, I honestly don't have the data
> to support that opinion. It does seem rather odd. Time for more
> research.
>
From what I've read it appears to be a completely new heart problem,
which was first spotted I think somewhere in the second half of the
1800's. I think they were advanced enough then with autopsies and such
that they had a decent grasp of common heart conditions which AFAIK were
always slow lingering long term diseases ending in heart failure. MIs
are a completely different animal and have clearly much different and
sudden symptoms and deaths. At any rate, I too would like to know why
they apparently jumped so much from 1930 to the mid 50's.
Even though the death rate from MIs and other heart disease has been
decreasing for the past few decades, this is exclusively due to better
treaments we have developed for the symptoms. In terms of the indidence
of heart disease, I believe it is still rising.
-- Brian Atkins Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/
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