More Canadians living with cardiovascular disease: Heart and Stroke Foundation

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Have you ever had a pain in your chest and wondered if you are having a heart attack?

It seems more and more people in the country are dealing with weakened tickers.

A new report suggests hundreds of thousands of Canadians should be worried about their heart health.

“I think what’s really interesting in the report and not previously articulated in that way is that all roads lead to heart failure,” says Sean Virani with the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

“So, all of the gains that we’ve had in terms of cardiovascular disease and our treatments of cardiovascular disease, specifically things like heart attack, have resulted in people living longer from those diseases. But at the end of the day, many of these patients will end up having weak hearts as a result of heart attack or any other type of damage that may have already transpired, so all roads lead to heart failure.”

The number of us living with damaged or weakened hearts is about 600,000, with about 50,000 new cases every year, says Virani.

He tells us there are a number of areas where care for patients could be improved.

“A lot of that revolves around building access and capacities for these patients, being able to develop systems of care so that patients can enter the system, getting access to heart failure care providers [and] to the best therapies that we know have an impact in this disease and also, systems that help mitigate the risk of hospitalization.”

He adds recognition and education are other important pieces.

“Allowing us to provide tools for knowledge translations so that we as specialists can help inform our colleagues in primary care and other areas of medicine as to what heart failure is — as well as patients and families — so that they can look for early recognition of signs and symptoms.”

Virani says there are a number of best practices already established and we need to make sure they are implemented rigourously in patients.

“We have gaps around human resources. There are a very finite number of heart failure specialists in British Columbia, and in Canada, generally. And so for us to have a footprint on this very large disease, we need to be able to have more care providers who are facile in the treatment in heart failure patients that are able to provide care to patients and families as well. That’s just not happening right now because we don’t have the human resource capacity to be able to do that work.”

The report finds hospital visits due to weakened or damaged hearts have gone up every year for the past six.

Virani says weakened hearts cost us nearly $3 billion every year.