Isah Yakubu first started feeling tightness in his chest, and then palpitations (the feeling that your heart is beating too quickly or not regularly) for sometime. He didn’t think much of it. But when he started having shortness of breath and feeling fatigued frequently, he had to go to the hospital and was diagnosed with heart disease.
“I have undergone surgery and made some lifestyle changes, “he said.
“I advise people to also go for regular checks on their heart. Because people may have heart problems without knowing.”
Dr Charles Anjorin, a consultant physician and cardiologist at the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, Maiduguri, said heart diseases are conditions that affect the structure and the function of the heart and the blood vessels.
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He said, “In medical parlance, they are known as cardiovascular diseases. Most of these diseases eventually manifest through a common pathway known as heart failure, a syndrome usually characterised by exercise intolerance (which may worsen progress to difficulty in breathing at rest) and swelling of the feet (which may progress to abdominal swelling), among several other features.”
He explained that heart failure is generally defined as the inability of the heart to optimally perform its function of pumping blood to achieve adequate supply of oxygen to all the tissue of the body, a vital requirement for life.
Dr Anjorin said heart disease is a very significant public health problem in Nigeria.
“In years gone by, the major health burden were infectious diseases. While these have not subsided, non-communicable diseases (with heart disease being a major example) have risen exponentially and a disease such as myocardial infarction (heart attack) which was rare before is now a common occurrence.”
He explained that hypertension is the commonest cause of heart disease in Nigeria, and that it affects about 39.1% of the population, being more common in the urban than rural areas.
“Other common heart diseases in Nigeria are:
Cardiomyopathies (a heart muscle disease of as yet uncertain origin that is associated with pregnancy and found also in middle age to elderly males).
“Valvular heart disease (a disease affecting the valves of the heart as a result of bacterial infections of the throat, found more in low socio-economic areas).
“Coronary heart disease: A disease that may present a heart attack, due to blockage of the blood vessels of the heart, (the incidence of this is rapidly rising as we adopt a more western and sedentary lifestyle).
“Others include congenital heart diseases and disorders of heart rhythm,” he said.
Quoting the World Health organisation, he said in 2016, non-communicable diseases accounted for 29% of all deaths in Nigeria and 11% of this was due to cardiovascular disease (CVD).
According to him, in the past 20 years, the prevalence of heart diseases has increased by 150%. He said in Lagos, 51.1% of out of hospital deaths are due to cardiovascular diseases with hypertensive heart disease and subsequent heart failure being the major causes.
The cardiologist further said heart diseases are most implicated in cases of sudden death, which have become very frequent in Nigeria. By sudden death, we mean unexpected death in an individual previously thought to be quite well.
He said common causes of this include severe hypertension, acute heart failure, stroke, heart attack (myocardial infarction) and disorders of the electrical activity of the heart, also known as disorders of heart rhythm.
He explained that the drivers or risk factors for heart/cardiovascular diseases in Nigeria can be grouped into two.
He said, “The first group includes factors that cannot be altered meaning nothing much can be done about it.
“These include age, gender, race, and family history. For example, an older person who is a male of the black race and with a history of heart or cardiovascular diseases in the family (either on the mother or father’s side) is more likely to have heart disease than another in whom all these factors do not congregate.
“The second group of drivers consist of conditions that can be changed or modified to prevent cardiovascular disease or reduce morbidity and mortality such as embarking on regular exercises rather than being sedentary or sitting all day, stopping smoking or alcohol ingestion, reducing salt intake, taking lots of fruits and vegetables, early treatment of diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus or high blood lipids (fat), weight reduction, and paying serious interventional attention to air (environmental) pollution.”
Dr Anjorin said to reduce the rapidly rising death and illness due to heart and cardiovascular diseases in our environment, the adage of “Prevention is better than cure” should be imbibed.
He said, “This should start from government policies that improve the health of the individual such as exercise periods at work, including provision of safe walkways on all roads constructed, control of environmental pollution, making primary health care and checks affordable or free and seriously slashing the cost of drugs in Nigeria hereby giving the masses a stress-free lifestyle. “Controlling or even reversing the modifiable risk factors as mentioned above, and easy and affordable health care, such as universal health coverage for all citizens will go a long way to reduce the burden of heart diseases in Nigeria.”
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