Heart attack patients who skip medication at high risk, study says

From CBC News:
Thirty per cent of heart attack patients who neglect to fill any of the prescribed medications for their condition may be dying within a year, a new Canadian study estimates.

According to researchers at Ontario's Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, a failure to adhere to medications that protect the heart, such as aspirin, beta blockers, statins or ACE inhibitors, could have deadly effects.

The study found that heart attack patients who did not fill any of their prescriptions had an 80 per cent higher chance of dying in the year following their heart attacks versus those who filled all of their prescriptions.

Those patients who filled some of their prescriptions but not others had a 40 per cent higher chance of dying in their first year versus those who filled all of them. ...more