Do the INTERHEART interventions eliminate or just postpone the occurrence of cardiovascular complications?
Professor David Wood: INTERHEART, as an epidemiological study, was not an intervention trial. However, the results indicate that adopting a healthy lifestyle will reduce an individual’s risk of developing myocardial infarction by 80%. Intervention trials have shown, for example, that it is possible to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by blood pressure lowering or lipid lowering. These trials have been short-term, up to 6 years, because it is considered unethical to continue a clinical trial when there is a clear evidence of benefit for a given treatment. We do not know whether continuation of these treatments to over 10 15 years will simply postpone the development of atherosclerosis or eliminate the disease entirely, in other words, we will die of something else. However, the expectation from projecting the trial results is that there will be a real reduction, or prevention, of atherosclerosis. What about the possible favourable effects of fish oil on lipids, and what about e
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