Although diet is the leading contributor to premature death from heart disease in the United States, fewer than one-quarter of people who undergo major heart events receive dietary counseling in the aftermath, a study finds. The research, led by a team from the University of Michigan Health Frankel Cardiovascular Center, tracked nearly 150,000 patients seen at hospitals across Michigan for serious heart conditions—such as heart attack and heart failure—between late 2015 and early 2020. Results published in Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics , show that clinicians documented providing dietary counseling in just 23% of cases within 90 days of hospitalization.
Such counseling could have happened as part of a supervised cardiac rehabilitation program, or a separate kind of care called medical nutrition therapy. That approach involves detailed nutritional assessments and targeted interventions led by registered dietitian nutritionists. "Nutrition counseling may reduce the risk a person has for cardiovascular episodes and disease, yet our research shows that the vast majority of patients, who are all at risk after significant heart events, are not receiving this essential education," said Brahmajee Nallamothu, M.
D., M.P.
H., senior author and professor of internal medicine-cardiology at U-M Medical School. Most of the dietary counseling documentation was within cardiac rehab; the program itself is considered underutilized, as only around 20-30% of eligible patient.
