Heart disease is attacking the young

Heart disease is attacking the young

JAKARTA (JP): Heart disease, already the number one killer in
Indonesia, is now attacking young people, experts said on
Saturday.

"Coronary arterial disease should receive our serious
attention because it has already attacked patients of much
younger ages, caused largely by changing lifestyle behavior,"
Prayitno, the dean of the School of Medicine at Trisakti
University, said in a seminar.

The number of people suffering from heart disease in Indonesia
has been increasing rapidly over the last six years, he said.

"Mostly affected by this disease are those of the productive
age category, between 35 to 54 years," he said at a symposium on
Advanced Management of Coronary Arterial Disease organized by
Trisakti and the Harapan Kita Cardiac Hospital.

Moeljadi Budisetio, also of Trisakti's School of Medicine,
also attributed the higher incidence of coronary heart disease to
changing lifestyles.

"The higher the standard of living, the higher the number of
degenerative diseases such as heart disease," Moeljadi said.

A survey on household health in 1992 found that the morbidity
and mortality rate from heart disease has increased during the
last 20 years, he pointed out.

Moeljadi said factors causing heart illness can be divided
into those that are preventable such as smoking, hypertension,
cholesterol, obesity and lack of exercise and those that are
unpreventable like age, gender and heredity.

He cautioned people in the city to especially stay away from
high calorie, high cholesterol fast food.

He also recommended changing diets to minimize the likelihood
of developing heart problems.

Moeljadi noted that Indonesia has not set limitations and
guidelines for dyslipidemia or cholesterol content.

Research studies have shown, however, that the cholesterol
content in Indonesians is not too much different compared to
people in other countries, he said.

Not all was gloomy at the symposium on Saturday as it
presented some of the latest methods in treating and detecting
heart diseases.

Brian Buxton, of the Austin & Repatriation Medical Center and
Epworth Private Hospital, Melbourne, presented a new technique on
coronary bypass surgery called arterial grafting.

Buxton, who performed the quadruple bypass operations on
Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Alatas in Melbourne last year,
said the new method uses the radial artery as a possible coronary
artery conduit.

The technique, first introduced in 1971, has already been
performed on up to 10,000 patients in Australia, France, Italy
and the United States.

Buxton said that before surgery a patient must undergo the
Alan Test to check his condition because 20 cm of the radial
artery in the arm will be cut out. The cut artery then will be
transplanted into the heart.

Another speaker, Hosen Kiat, assistant professor at the School
of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles,
reviewed nuclear cardiology testing used to detect heart attacks.

The new procedure may improve upon the stress
electrocardiogram in the evaluation of patients with known or
suspected coronary artery disease, said Indonesian-born Kiat.

Responding to a question, Kiat said nuclear radiology could be
performed on patients with kidney or liver illnesses.

Kiat later made a presentation on effective exercise stress
testing.

Other speakers at the symposium included Manoefris Kasim of
Harapan Kita Cardiac Hospital, who discussed the diagnosis of
coronary arterial disease with thallium, and Sjukri Karim of the
same hospital, who gave a presentation on the management of
coronary arterial disease in Indonesia. (05)