Flu shot urged for heart disease patients

NEW YORK, Sep 28 (REUTERS) A new advisory by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology is recommending that patients with cardiovascular disease get an annual vaccination against influenza.

This should reduce illness due to cardiovascular disease and cut mortality rates in this population.

Such patients, however, should not be given the nasal-spray flu vaccine, according to the advisory, which is currently available online and slated to appear in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Several reports have shown that annual flu vaccination can greatly reduce mortality in adults and children with cardiovascular conditions, yet in 2005 only about one in three adults with such conditions had a flu shot.

''If we vaccinated at least 60% of the 13.2 million people with coronary heart disease in the US against influenza, we could prevent hundreds of deaths and thousands of cases of flu each year,'' Dr. Matthew M. Davis, lead author of the advisory and an internist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, said in a statement.

''Most people with heart disease visit their cardiologists during the time when they should get the flu shot, but only about half of cardiologists in the US stock the vaccine in their clinics,'' Davis commented.

REUTERS SAM SND1115