A flu shot could save your life
If you have a history of heart disease, as more than 12 million U.S. adults do, roll up your sleeve and bare your arm, urges a new advisory from the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology. Getting a flu shot not only protects against influenza, say heart specialists, but could also keep you alive and out of the hospital.
Vaccination could save as many as 91,000 lives a year in the United States alone, says cardiologist Mohammed Madjid, a Texas Heart Institute flu researcher. A recent South American study found that a vaccinated group of individuals with cardiovascular disease had one fourth the risk of dying from a heart attack compared with an unvaccinated group over the next year and had half the risk of any kind of heart event. Madjid argues, in fact, that flu shots are at least as effective in reducing deaths as putting the same number of people on statins, and considerably cheaper.
It isn't clear how flu raises the chances of heart attack, heart failure, stroke, and other cardiovascular events. One possibility: Inflammation, one of the body's responses to flu, alters the blood chemistry in ways that speed up the progress of heart disease.
That flu does have such an impact, however, especially on young children and on adults age 65 and above, is unchallenged. Nearly a third of heart attacks are preceded by an upper respiratory infection, and the rate of heart attack peaks in the winter. One study even found that deaths from heart attack and stroke neatly track the rise and fall of flu activity.
Yet only about one third of adults with cardiovascular disease, notes the advisory in the journal Circulation, were immunized against flu last year. Older members of this group were much more vigilant, but the 71 percent of them who got flu shots still fell short of the 90 percent target set by the federal government.
The advisory suggests that a "superb but frequently missed opportunity" to boost the numbers would be for more cardiologists to offer flu shots. Only about half of them do, compared with more than 70 percent of endocrinologists and primary-care physicians and more than 90 percent of pulmonologists.
Adults are cautioned to get a shot using killed virus and not to use FluMist, a nasal spray using weakened but live virus; the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cites the possibility of getting flu from the spray. Madjid calls the alleged risk "a false myth." He wouldn't hesitate, he says, to give it to heart patients of any age provided their immune systems were normal. But it is not a choice most people will have to make. FluMist is approved for use only in adults younger than age 50 and children at least 5 years old—and the CDC says there's a good supply of injectable vaccine for the coming flu season.