Interview: How to look after your heart

28 Feb 2017

February is Heart Month, and time to think about your cardiac health. 

What would you do if you could pinpoint the day you were going to have a heart attack? What about if you could stop it from happening altogether?

Well, you don’t need a crystal ball or time machine. Modern scanning technologies can give you accurate and useful information for looking after your heart, says Dr Warrick Bishop, cardiologist and author of Have You Planned Your Heart Attack?

“The opportunity to look into someone’s heart and look at the health of their arteries, before they’ve had an event, is a game changer,” Dr Bishop says.

Weighing up the risks

Most heart health tests calculate the risk of an individual based on a number of health factors – including cholesterol levels and blood pressure – and giving them a percentage that indicates how likely they are to have a Major Adverse Cardiovascular Event (MACE) within the next five to ten years.

“A risk calculator doesn’t predict the risk for an individual patient. Rather, it provides the rate events occur in a group of 100 individuals with the same characteristics. This does not tell us who of the 100 will have an event,” says Dr Bishop. 

Traditionally, a five per cent chance of heart attack has been classified as ‘low risk’, something that Dr Bishop wants people to reevaluate.

“If there was a five per cent risk of a plane crashing every time it took off, it would be completely unacceptable. Yet we take that and call it low risk in coronary heart disease. It’s extraordinary.”

“I don’t care if I’m in a five per cent risk group, I want to know if I’m one of the five or one of the 95,” he says.

Prevention is better than a cure

Dr Bishop says everyone has a choice – to get a CT scan on their heart and equip their doctor with information to help prevent a heart attack, or wait till something happens and deal with it then.

Modern CT scanning technology has opened the door for incredibly accurate measures of your heart’s actual health.

“This is a non-invasive, safe way to evaluate the buildup of cholesterol, or atheroma, and get an indication of the health of the coronary arteries in an asymptomatic person,” says Dr Bishop. 

When should I get screened?

Dr Bishop recommends screening at 50 years old for men and 60 years old for women (or earlier if there are other risk factors such as family history involved).

Maybe you feel like you don’t want to know if there’s anything wrong with your heart. Dr Bishop says that’s understandable.

“I have had patients and even colleagues say to me they just don’t want to know what’s going on with their heart. They don’t want to know in case it is bad news. I can understand this, but I say to them ‘Do you have your car serviced? If you do, why?’

“The choice between finding out about brakes that may fail during a scheduled service or on a drive during a family holiday is a no-brainer.

"I wrote this book for the motivated, interested individuals who want to care for their heart health proactively.” 

For more information, visit: www.haveyouplannedyourheartattack.com.au