People who see doctor in month after ER visit for chest pain do better: study

TORONTO – A new study suggests people who have been treated in hospital for chest pains do better over the long-term if they see a doctor within 30 days of being released after the event.

In particular the study found that people who saw a cardiologist were more likely to be alive a year later than people who saw a family physician or didn’t get any medical followup after an episode in which they were treated in hospital for chest pain.

The study was done by researchers at Toronto’s Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences and is published in the journal Circulation.

It looked at people at high risk for heart disease to see whether they went on to get followup diagnostic and medical care after their chest pain episode.

Only 17 per cent saw a cardiologist within the month after the event, 58 per cent saw a primary care doctor, but 25 per cent got no followup care within that 30-day window.

The people who saw cardiologists were 21 per cent more likely to be alive a year later than those who got no followup care.

And those who saw a family doctor were 15 per cent less likely to have had a heart attack or died in the year after the event than people who didn’t see a doctor about their heart problems.

The senior author of the study is Dr. Dennis Ko, a scientist at ICES and a cardiologist at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. He suggests the message is that people should see a doctor after suffering chest pain.

“In my mind I think seeing a family doctor, it’s helpful. I think it is significantly better than not seeing anybody. But I think the people who saw a cardiologist also did better.”

The study was based on the medical records of nearly 57,000 Ontario residents who went to hospital with chest pain between April 1, 2004 and March 31, 2010.