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Cardiovascular disease as a leading cause of death: how are pharmacists getting involved?

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-01-01, 00:00 authored by Kevin Mc NamaraKevin Mc Namara, Hamzah Alzubaidi, John Keith Jackson
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are a leading cause of death globally. This article explores the evidence surrounding community pharmacist interventions to reduce cardiovascular events and related mortality and to improve the management of CVD risk factors. We summarize a range of systematic reviews and leading randomized controlled trials and provide critical appraisal. Major observations are that very few trials directly measure clinical outcomes, potentially owing to a range of challenges in this regard. By contrast, there is an extensive, high-quality evidence to suggest that improvements can be achieved for key CVD risk factors such as hypertension, dyslipidemia, tobacco use, and elevated hemoglobin A1c. The heterogeneity of interventions tested and considerable variation of the context under which implementation occurred suggest that caution is warranted in the interpretation of meta-analyses. It is highly important to generate evidence for pharmacist interventions in developing countries where a majority of the global CVD burden will be experienced in the near future. A growing capacity for clinical registry trials and data linkage might allow future research to collect clinical outcomes data more often.

History

Journal

Integrated pharmacy research and practice

Volume

8

Pagination

1 - 11

Publisher

Dove Medical Press

Location

Macclesfield, Eng.

ISSN

2230-5254

eISSN

2230-5254

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2019, Mc Namara et al.