‘How to keep your heart healthy’
What do you think people should do to keep their heart healthy? For the heart generally, it is the same thing we recommend for all preventive strategies. That is you have to be careful of what goes inside of you, that is nutrition. You have to be active and you have to avoid certain lifestyles […]
What do you think people should do to keep their heart healthy?
For the heart generally, it is the same thing we recommend for all preventive strategies. That is you have to be careful of what goes inside of you, that is nutrition. You have to be active and you have to avoid certain lifestyles which can increase the risk of heart disease. That is avoiding sedentary life, a type of lifestyle with no or irregular physical activity.
Secondly, it is to avoid intake of fatty substances, red meat, fried foods and going to the eating houses all the time to eat French fries, chips, chicken, and drinks with high choleric content. That is why kids are getting obese. People eating junk foods are increasing their risk of diabetes and heart failure down the road. Junk food is useless the irony is that the Westerners are now running away from them but here in Nigeria people are patronizing junk food houses.
Energy drinks are useless. What energy do you get from them? They contain things that irritate your heart.
And if you have certain health conditions, try to manage them well. Such things include diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, don’t smoke, and also have regular checks particularly if you have these risks and family history as well.
What increases the risk of heart disease?
Several things, some are modifiable and some are not. The non modifiable ones are in your genes. Most things run in the family and are gene driven. You cannot do much about that. That is if any of your relatives have had heart condition, there is a risk of someone else in that family having it. That is a non-modifiable risk.
There are also modifiable ones such as tobacco use, alcohol use, sedentary life style, diabetes and high cholesterol as well as high blood pressure.
Specifically, what causes heart attack?
Heart attack is caused in a vulnerable patient, that is a patient who has a set of these conditions we just described. These conditions or in combination increase your risk. But specifically what causes a heart attack is when there is a blood clot, particularly blockage of the artery that supplies the heart muscle with blood, and you have a plaque which comes from abnormal cholesterol and build up around the blood vessels.
These things can be quiet and you can live your normal life without any event. But if for some reasons there is a disturbance or a change in the caliber of that plaque, blood elements can stick, and block the blood vessel depriving the heart muscle from getting blood.
If that occurs suddenly by definition the operation of the heart muscle dies that is a heart attack.
Are there warning signs of heart attack?
Generally when you have insufficiency of blood flow to the heart muscle you can have discomfort in the chest .Typically people will complain of discomfort in their chest in other words when they start doing certain things like walking a distance, climbing steps , doing household chores or when they do exercise, they complain. It could be tiredness, pressure or heaviness in their chest.
Initially that is how it presents. When they stop what they are doing, the symptom goes away.
And then if the blockage gets more narrow there can be discomfort even when they are not doing those things. But also it can be sudden in other words many have this chest pain, sometimes it is difficulty in breathing, shortness of breath particularly as people get older, the sensation of pain is altered and also in women and people who have diabetes , they may not have typical symptoms.
Fifty percent of the time people can die suddenly without prior symptoms. They just collapse.
What is the first thing to do when someone is having a heart attack around you?
It is to get that person to a properly qualified doctor. Because there is no much you can do.
What about cardiopulmonary resuscitation, CPR?
You don’t do CPR on someone who has heart attack, you do CPR on someone who has collapsed. But someone who is having chest pain and talking to you what do you do CPR on the person for.
CPR is cardiopulmonary resuscitation that means you have to resuscitate. Somebody has to have an indication for resuscitation. So chest pain is not an indication for CPR rather it is an indication that there may be an impending danger and your heart demands that you go to the nearest facility where there are properly qualified doctors that can administer proper diagnosis and treatment.
In addition, since cardiac disease is the number one cause of death, every family member has to be taught the act of cardiac resuscitation, if someone collapses in front of you and you know how to do cardiac resuscitation, you may be saving that person’s life.
Both patients and doctors need to be trained on the warning signs, and refer them to people qualified to treat them rather than keeping them. People can die in their sleep but if you have chest pain and difficulty breathing or notice your leg swelling anything that is not there you should call your doctor. And when you see your doctor ask questions, ask what he is treating you for , ask about the medicine he is giving you, and when you are not getting better see second opinion
People sometimes pant heavily when they climb the staircase, is that really good for the heart?
Anytime you do an exercise , whether you walk a distance or climb the steps, your heart rate should increase, if it doesn’t increase, then something is wrong. Exercise doesn’t necessarily really mean you have to climb the stairs, you can do brisk walking but the heart rate should augment with exercise.
It depends on the level of discomfort, and how decompensate you have been. If you have not been doing exercise regularly and you start climbing two flight of stairs you will have discomfort. So you have to slowly build yourself up.
Within the last few years we have seen an increase in the rate of open heart surgeries performed particularly on minors in this country, why is it not being done on adults?
Open heart surgery is being done on adults. The terminology open heart surgery is a misnormer. People just go on air and start saying they are doing open heart surgery or using certain terminologies that are confusing to the public.
Open heart surgery by definition is that you open the chest and correct an anomaly that is within the chest or the heart. Open heart surgery is a wrongly used term because it doesn’t mean that each time you open the heart or the chest of certain individual that you are doing something in the heart and vice versa.
Actually these days we can perform surgeries on the heart without opening the chest. What you should say is that corrective surgeries are being done some certain categories of patients particularly young people. Like people who have structural or congenital heart defects what people refer to as hole in the heart or congenital heart disease.
They are not necessarily corrected by surgical means but other ways as well.
But there are instances in this country when people come from outside and to perform corrective surgery and it has been on both adults and children.
We do all kinds of heart surgeries in this country , we replace valves, we put stents , we have done a bunch of them at the University Teaching Hospital (UNTH) Enugu , UNTH Ibadan and UNTH Lagos
Corrective surgical operations have been done on patients both adults and children and it is done in increasing numbers in this country and that is what was done in National Hospital and Garki hospital recently.
What we call open heart surgery the way we know it has never been done in Abuja. So that correction should be noted. Rather there have been surgical procedures on the heart done on children in Abuja.
Do you think we have enough cardiologists or cardio vascular specialists in the country?
No ,we don’t. There is no country in the world that has enough. I don’t know the exact number that we have but certainly the country is grossly understaffed.
Is there difference between cardiologist and cardio vascular expert?
A cardiovascular expert does not necessarily have to be a cardiologist . He could be a nutritionist dedicating life and service to an aspect of cardio vascular diseases. You are still an expert in that field.
But a cardiologist is somebody who has undergone specialized training in management and diagnosis of heart disease, not just one thing but a broad range of things. And it doesn’t mean they are experts in every aspect of cardio vascular disease. Within that basket you also have sub specialty.