heart to heart

People who are struck down with chest pains and heart attacks and blocked arteries must feel like they have won a lottery when a successful operation let’s them resume a pretty normal life.

But apparently that’s not good enough for some patients. They are prepared to gamble again and again. Not on lottery tickets but with their lives.

According to a disturbing new study more than half of heart patients fail to change their lifestyles after major life-saving surgery. Even though most of them suffered a heart attack or chest pains before surgery.

Hard to believe. But researchers at the University of Western Sydney have a plausible theory as to why heart victims are not jolted into changing their lifestyles and eating habits and exercise routines.

It’s because recent advances into heart valve and artery repairs are so quick and so simple. ‘Tricks’ like angioplasty – using a tiny balloon to unclog or widen narrow arteries around the heart – can be completed in about half an hour.

It gives patients the dangerously misguided belief that their condition wasn’t that serious.

According to the survey two years after their surgery almost 60% of patients still had extremely high risk factors like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, were overweight and physically inactive.

People were also under the possibly fatal misconception that the angioplasty had ‘cured’ them rather than temporarily repaired the damage.

Maybe doctors aren’t getting the message through but surely common sense should tell you you’ve had a wakeup call.

An even worse case scenario involves liver transplant patients in Britain. Remember hard-drinking soccer star George Best had one. And started drinking again and he drank himself to death.

One survey showed that of 250 people who received liver transplants more than 100 started drinking again.

You can understand why surgeons refuse to operate on lung cancer victims who still smoke or treat cirrhosis of the liver victims who still drink. Especially when donor organs are so rare in this country.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2007