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)