Tech, lifestyle keys to fighting heart disease

Despite advances in medical technology and procedures, heart disease remains the No. 1 killer in this country. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 600,000 Americans die from it every year — more than all forms of cancer combined. And a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association claims that more than half of all U.S. citizens over the age of 45 will develop some form of heart disease in their lifetime.

But this is nothing new. Health-care professionals have been preaching the benefits of lifestyle changes for years. So why is heart disease still so prevalent?

Dr. Jason Hatch is an interventional cardiologist with Banner Health. “It’s mostly just public education and awareness, getting the word out about cardiovascular health and what’s important to maintain that. I mean, your doctor tells you ‘don’t smoke, don’t drink a lot, exercise, eat your vegetables,’ and yet there’s still this disconnect about, when the rubber hits the road, are we really doing that?”

Here in Colorado, it appears we are, to some extent. The Centennial State routinely ranks on the low end of the scale when it comes to obesity and cardiovascular disease rates. But Dr. Brad Oldemeyer, medical director of UCHealth’s cardiac catheterization laboratories in Northern Colorado, claims we’re not doing enough. “Even though we’re one of the healthiest states in the country, we still have very high numbers of heart attacks and strokes,” he says. “It’s good comparatively, but it could be better if we would do a better job with preventative medicine and diet and exercise.”

Hatch echos that sentiment. “I think sitting may be the new smoking for our generation,” he noted. “Our bodies weren’t made to be as sedentary as we are.”

Being diagnosed with heart disease may sound dire, but it’s not the end of the world, according to Dr. Scott Blois, a heart-failure specialist with Boulder Community Health. “If you ‘Google’ it, you’ll come up with some pretty scary survival numbers, but if people get seen early enough in the disease process, it’s very treatable … you can’t cure it, but it can have a very good prognosis even as a chronic disease.”

And new technologies are helping, both with diagnosis and treatment. “At BCH, we’re doing what’s called treadmill oxygen consumption testing,” Blois explained, “where we put a patient on a very advanced treadmill system while wearing an oxygen mask, which helps us look at the reserve function of the heart. We know that the stronger the heart is, the more oxygen you consume each minute you exercise and the weaker the heart, the less oxygen, and that is what the test measures.”

Oldemeyer points to even more advances. “We now have the ability to correct heart-valve problems through catheters and procedures that take an hour and patients go home the next day, in place of open-heart surgery that lasts for three or four hours and people are in the hospital for five to seven days. There’s now something called a bio-absorbable stent, we put it in and when we look a year or two later, it’s completely absorbed by the body — it’s gone — so it has that advantage of not leaving a foreign object in the coronary arteries for the rest of your life.”

And the new technology isn’t limited to the operating room. “I think the wearable devices that people are getting into are helping,” Hatch said, “whether the Fitbits or Jawbones or Apple watches or whatever we have to sort of coax us into being more active. I think that’s a good utilization of technology because sometimes the motivating factor is what we need.”

But in the end, all agree that real change will come only through education. “It is addressed first and foremost by lifestyle modification,” Oldemeyer said, “so it should be diet and exercise, avoiding fast foods, and if everybody did that, we would have phenomenal success in preventing heart attacks and strokes.”

As Hatch puts it, “We just want people to be as healthy as they can. I’m happy to take care of patients recovering from heart attacks, but it’s more fun when people are happy and active and not having to take four or five different medicines for their heart because there’s been damage done to it. The more people we can keep out of the hospital, the better.”

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