According to a new study, low-income people had a higher risk of dying following a heart attack.

  A retrospective investigation reveals that low-income residents hospitalised with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) have significantly higher mortality rates than higher-income individuals. The findings were presented today at the 2022 Scientific Sessions of the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI).

Poverty has been linked to poor cardiovascular disease clinical outcomes. STEMI is a type of heart attack that mostly affects the bottom chambers of the heart and is more severe and hazardous than other heart attacks. While studies show a link between income and co-morbidities, nothing is known about the impact of a patient's income on in-hospital mortality after a STEMI.

The authors identified all adult patients admitted with STEMI and grouped them into four quartiles according to the median household income in the patient's zip code. There were 184,150 (35.1%) low-income residents and 123,815 (19.4%) high-income residents among the 639,300 STEMI hospitalizations.

The following are some of the study's findings:

• In comparison to the highest income residents, the low - income residents had increased all-cause mortality, duration of stay, rate of invasive mechanical ventilation, and lower inflation-adjusted cost. The lowest-income residents died at a rate of 11.8 percent, while the highest-income individuals died at a rate of 10.4 percent.
• Age: Residents with the lowest incomes likely to be younger (mean age of 63.5) than those with the highest incomes (mean age of 65.7).
• Gender: In the lowest income category (35.7 percent), there were more females than in the highest income group (29.8 percent ).
• In comparison to the other groups, low-income residents had the highest number of black, Hispanic, and Native American patients and the lowest proportion of white, Asian, and Pacific Islander patients.
• In comparison to other groups, residents with the highest income had more admissions in urban hospitals, whereas those with the lowest income had more hospitalizations in rural hospitals.
• While the fatality rate for low-income inhabitants was greater, the cost per hospitalisation was lower ($26,503 vs. $30,540) for high-income residents.

ICD codes were used to identify STEMI patients in a retrospective examination of adult discharges from the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) between 2016 and 2018. The income of the zip code where the patient lived was used to divide the patients into quartiles. Several patient- and hospital-level factors were factored into the study models. To represent national estimates, prevalence estimates were weighted using NIS-provided discharge-level weights.

"This study emphasises the rising need to reduce the health inequalities divide that disproportionately affects low-income patients," said Abdul Mannan Khan Minhas, MD, of Hattiesburg Clinic Hospital Care Service in Hattiesburg, Miss., the study's principal researcher. "As physicians, we must work to ensure that everyone has access to high-quality medical care and consider the social and economic variables that may lead to wide disparities in results."