Pollution an additional stress for heart patients

NEW DELHI: Winter had been a nightmare for 27-year-old Bilal Ahmed for almost two years.

Bilal, who had lost around 85% of his heart fuction and had been waiting for a transplant, became breathless and had chest pains every once in a while. But the number of times he had to visit the hospital emergency went up every time the pollution levels spiked in the city.

More than half of Bilal’s nearly 15 yearly visits to the emergency department of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) were during the months when the pollution levels were high.

“The pollution levels in the city troubled me a lot; every ten to fifteen days, I would end up in the emergency with chest pains and breathlessness. I got a little better only when the doctors gave me some injection,” said Ahmed, who underwent a heart transplant at AIIMS in March this year.

He had dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition where the heart chamber enlarges and weakens reducing the heart’s ability to pump blood.

“When a patient is in heart failure, their heart and lungs are already under a lot of stress. A spike in pollution levels puts more stress on the organs and aggravates the symptoms of patients suffering from such conditions,” said Dr Sandeep Seth, the doctor who treated Bilal and a professor of cardiology at AIIMS.

For patients like Bilal, whose condition cannot be reversed, heart transplant is the only option. “I could barely do anything when I was waiting for a transplant. Moving around felt like a huge task. Even during my initial consultation with a cardiologist, I was told that I would need a transplant because there was hardly any heart function left,” said Bilal, who runs a saloon in Pitampura

Every year, almost 10,000 people in the country need a heart transplant, but only 150 to 200 receive it because of a shortage of organs. There is a severe shortage of all organs – only 8,000 of the two lakh in need of a kidney transplant get it and almost 1,800 of nearly 80,000 in need of liver transplant get it. In India, the rates of organ donation is very low – only 0.8 per million population.

To promote organ donation, the Organ Retrieval and Banking Organisation at AIIMS felicitated the families of organ, tissue, and whole body donors on Wednesday.

Air pollution is also a major risk factor for several cardiac diseases, especially heart attack.

“It is well known that pollution increases the risk of heart attack and stroke, along with respiratory ailments. The link between air pollution and conditions like hypertension and diabetes is also well known, which are risk factors for several heart diseases,” said Dr Sharma.

A study published in Lancet Global Health last year shows that ischaemic heart disease lead to 23.8% of all pollution related disability-adjusted life years (DALYS) or the number of years lost due to ill-health attributable to pollution. The study showed that Indians would live 1.7 years more on average if there was no air pollution.

“When ORBO was set up, the deceased donation activity was negligible in Delhi. ORBO started facilitating organ donation, started a brain death donor registry, and carried out mass awareness. Now, we have a realtime mandatory notification of all brain dead patients and also round the clock availability of transplant coordination staff. We are the first institute to have started it,” said Dr Aarti Vij, head of ORBO.