Older people are more likely to face serious heart problems in the US than in Denmark

Older Americans and Danes might both have government-sponsored healthcare, but the United States still lags behind the Scandinavian nation when it comes to health outcomes, according to a new study.

The findings, published in the journal JAMA Cardiology, offer insight into how different health systems – one fully public and the other a public-private hybrid – translate to health outcomes for heart disease, which is the top cause of death in the US and second leading cause in Denmark.

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and Harvard Medical School in the US compared hospitalisation rates for heart attacks, heart failure, and ischemic stroke – when blood supply is reduced, preventing oxygen from getting to the brain – among adults 65 and older in both countries.

They included about 1.2 million people in the US and 16,000 in Denmark.

The hospitalisation rate was 1.5 times higher in the US than in Denmark, with a respective 20.8 and 13.9 hospitalisations per 1,000 people, according to the study.

Americans were also slightly more likely than Danes to die within 30 days of being hospitalised.

That’s in line with data from the Global Burden of Disease study, which shows that in 2021, the death rate from cardiovascular diseases was 221.8 per 100,000 in Denmark – 20 per cent lower than in the US (272.3).

The new study indicates wealth gaps, and how the health systems are structured, may help explain these differences.

While higher-income Americans had slightly higher hospitalisation rates compared with wealthy Danes, the biggest disparities occurred among lower income residents.

When it comes to heart failure, for example, low income Danes had a hospitalisation rate of 7.2 per 1,000. For Americans, that figure shot to 24 per 1,000.

“These are really big differences,” Dr Gunnar Gislason, a cardiologist and one of the study’s authors, told Euronews Health.

The researchers offered a few potential reasons behind the results.

While the US and Denmark are both among the wealthiest nations in the world, the US has a higher poverty rate and more income inequality, which could make it harder for many people to access healthcare.

The US also has a “fragmented”