The American Heart Association says more than 1 million Americans are hospitalized for heart attacks every year, and nearly half die.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States.
But in an eight-state study of hospital discharge data, Dr. John W. Westfall and a colleague at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center found that 10 percent to 15 percent of heart attack incidents might have been counted twice because of the increasingly common practice of transferring patients between hospitals. If that rate of overcounting is the same nationwide, then the true number of U.S. heart attacks each year is 800,000 or 900,000, Westfall said. The double-counting is especially a problem in rural areas, where heart attack patients are often transferred to large urban hospitals for specialized care. There are about 100,000 or 200,000 fewer heart attacks per year. The bad news is that you're more likely to die from your heart attack than we previously thought.