Walking ‘time bombs’
EXECUTIVE Director of the Heart Foundation of Jamaica (HFJ), Deborah Chen, at the launch of Heart Month 2014 last Tuesday, said people with high blood pressure who are unaware of their condition are “walking around like time bombs”.
Chen said that the HFJ is now compiling statistics for 2013, but for 2012, the organisation screened just over 88,000 people through their various programmes. A total of 41,872 people were screened for blood pressure and of that number, 78 per cent were found to be either pre-hypertensive, or fall within the stage one or stage two categories of hypertension. However, 44 per cent of them were not aware that they had the ‘silent killer’.
“Some of them were already on medication and either the medication wasn’t working and they didn’t go back or didn’t check it or they were not taking it properly,” Chen said, adding some of the reasons these people gave for not taking their medication: ‘Mi feel alright today so, no medicine’, ‘mi nuh get nuh headache, so I leave off of it’, ‘too much thing in your blood not good for you’.
The theme for Heart Month 2014 is ‘Know Your Numbers’ and Chen pointed out that there is a direct relationship between being aware of your condition and receiving treatment and preventing complications .
Hypertension is just one of the risk factors, or ‘numbers’ that should be known, that is associated with cardiovascular disease – the leading cause of death among adults in Jamaica.
The HFJ admits that you cannot control many of the factors that can cause heart disease, like sex, age or family history, but you can choose to make healthier lifestyle changes that can impact other risk factors, such as your blood pressure, cholesterol levels, blood glucose, weight and body mass index.
For this month, the HFJ is saying that knowing your numbers is the key to a healthier heart.
But what are these numbers?
Risk factors Optimal level
Blood pressure Less than 120/80 mm Hg
Total cholesterol Less than 5.2 mmol/L or 200 mg/dL
LDL – ‘bad’ cholesterol Less that 3.4 mmol/L or 100 mg/dL
HDL – ‘good’ cholesterol Greater than 3.3 mmol/dL (60 mg/dL)
Triglycerides Less than 1.7 mmol/L (150 mg/dL
Fasting Glucose Less than 5.6 mmol/L (100 mg/dL
Haemoglobin A1c Less than 5.7%
Body mass index 18.5-24.9 kg/m2
Waist circumference (women/men) less than 35 inches/40 inches
The HFJ says men and women who are at risk for cardiovascular disease should make periodic visits to a cardiologist.
-Anika Richards