Irish Daily Mirror
2ND July 2012
New heart research may prevent stroke
Irregular heartbeats entered the public consciousness when we found out Tony Blair had the condition and he’s a patron of the Arrhythmia Alliance.
His particular kind of irregular heartbeat is atrial fibrillation (AF). This is a common medical condition that we don’t really hear about, but it has now become something of a medical celebrity.
In 2009, the British Heart Foundation ran a campaign encouraging everyone to check their pulse for irregularities. A hare-brained idea, in my opinion, as even a regular pulse can be hard to feel and an irregular one can even present problems for a qualified doctor.
And a few months ago, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh called for a national programme to scan over -65s for AF.
This fuss puzzled me. No one was making a fuss about it 10 or 15 years ago. It wasn’t a prime subject for cutting-edge research. And besides, I’d had it.
Suddenly one afternoon, I felt very tired. As a reflex, I instantly felt for my pulse. To my astonishment, it was irregular. I continued to count.
Hang on, it was irregularly irregular – the classic sign of AF. I was abroad, no doctor to offhand, what to do? I decided I should lie down and go to sleep. I reckoned if I could sleep for just 20 minutes, my troubled heart would settle down. And thankfully it did.
In searching for a cause of the attack, I remembered I’d had a sore throat a few days before. That led me to self-diagnose myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, caused by a virus.
The cardiologist I saw when I got home agreed. But what if I’d continued to fibrillate, wouldn’t I have gone into heart failure? NO, you can fibrillate for a long time before that happens.
AF is the commonest cardiac irregularity with an estimated one in 10 people over 75 affected. The reason doctors are paying more attention to it is that in this age group it carries a five times higher risk of stroke.
This is because the fluttering of the heart causes eddies in the blood and it forms clots. On leaving the heart they can cause strokes. It’s reckoned that if all patients with AF were diagnosed and treated, we would have 10,000 fewer strokes a year.
So the current preoccupation with AF reflects a shift from treating the AF itself to stroke prevention with a new generation of anticoagulants.
Just a few months ago, the World Congress of Cardiology launched “1 million 1 mission” campaign to prevent AF-related stroke worldwide. It seems AF has come of age.