The most celebrated organ in the human body is quivering from human apathy over the state of its health.
By: Joseph Masilamany
Thu, 13 Nov 2008
THE human heart beats 100,000 times every day and in a 70-year lifespan, it would have beaten 2.5 billion times.
Tan Sri Ismail Merican
It is the most hard-working organ in the body, pumping about a million barrels of blood during an average lifetime.
But when the heart sends out an SOS – read, "shooting pain" radiating from the chest (angina) – it is the first sign that the heart is in trouble.
The primary cause of this symptom is the build-up of fatty plaques in the coronary vessels. When these plaques burst, they block the vessels, causing the heart to pump erratically or stop beating.
In the emergency rooms, this is one scene that repeats itself much too often. A specialist cardio nurse tears off the sheet from an ECG machine, takes a cursory glance and dashes off to the nearest call-button to summon Code Blue.
This is a clear indication that alarm bells are ringing across the Asian region signalling the ever-increasing death toll from cardiovascular disease (CVD) and its related morbid conditions – diabetes, hypertension and strokes.
In Malaysia, it is no longer a case of "whether or not I will suffer a heart attack" but "for whom the bell tolls next?" as one cardiologist aptly puts it.
Health Ministry director-general Tan Sri Ismail Merican lamented: "Many people do not realise how critical CVD can be. If there are those who are aware, their level of awareness is just ‘piecemeal knowledge’ of the disease.
{Read From Original Source....}
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