Beta Blockers Are Underprescribed for Elderly Heart Patients. Two recent studies have shown that fewer elderly heart attack patients received beta blockers than would benefit from them. One study, by scientists at the University of Maryland Medical Center, appeared in the Aug. 20 New England Journal of Medicine; the other, by researchers at Connecticut's Yale-New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, was published in the Aug. 19 Journal of the American Medical Association. The NEJM study noted that beta blockers improve survival rates in patients of all ages. It found that only 34 percent of heart attack patients in the Medicare database (which contains more than 200,000 entries) received beta blockers upon discharge from the hospital; these patients were 40 percent less likely to die over the next two years that patients who did not receive the drugs. The JAMA study found large variations nationwide among prescription rates for beta blockers. Overall, about half the candidate patients in this study received beta blockers, and these patients had a 14 percent lower mortality rate in the year after their discharge.
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