Dar Shifa most highly equipped cardiac facility: Dr Mahdi
‘Golden Hour critical when it comes to heart attack’
By Arab Times Staff
KUWAIT CITY, July 26: Dar Shifa is the only private hospital that is fully equipped with a full cardiac team; a cardiac surgeon, cardiac catheterization laboratory, and if a patient walks in anytime of the day or night there’s a consultant ready to take this patient to the right place and have him taken care of. It is the most highly equipped cardiac facility in the private sector, says Dr Bader Al Mahdi, a consultant interventional cardiologist at Dar Shifa Hospital, as he spoke to Arab Times in an exclusive Monday.
Bader Al Mahdi is a Consultant Interventional Cardiologist who graduated from Medical School in the Royal College of Ireland in 2001 and finished his medical boards in 2007. He finished Cardiology fellowship in 2013 after attending King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Diagnostic
Dr Almahdi became interested in invasive cardiology. So he joined the fellowship training program in interventional cardiology at the McGill University Health Centre (Royal Victoria Hospital) in Montreal, Canada in 2013 and came back in 2014 as an interventional cardiologist. He’s been practicing for two years now and has now moved to Dar Shifa Hospital only two months ago.
Defining interventional cardiology, Dr Mahdi indicated that it is a subdivision of general cardiology where basically the doctors introduce small plastic tubes to get into blood vessels using them as diagnostic tools, where contrast under x-ray guidance is injected to view the blood vessels, arteries, veins or the heart itself. “If there is any pathology or any abnormalities sometimes they could be treated, placing a stent or an occlusion device to open up a blood artery or to fix a hole in the heart”.
Daily exercises, watching over your diet, less red meat, less fat, less sugar
Zafran’s Seafood Sensation dish
as well as more green vegetables, less refined foods and more wholesome foods are the ways to go for one to keep healthy, says Dr. Mahdi.
These days, it’s not uncommon to see an otherwise healthy person getting cardiac arrest. People do walk about with risk factors for diseases: smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure, blood with tendency to coagulate, strong family history of premature coronary artery disease, high levels of bad cholesterol in the blood are all risk factors that predisposes the arteries to get narrower and narrower over time and eventually close to result in heart attack. “The artery in that case is not perfuse properly with blood and the patient gets chest pain, basically part of the heart muscle dies because a part of the heart muscle is blocked, so that is why you see a healthy person getting heart attack”.
There are various ways in which the heart gets stressed. Physical stress of the heart is good when you run, lift weights, do sports or swim. All these are good activities for the heart. But psychological stress could be dealt with by relaxation. “But a footballer or sports person collapsing and dying on the field could be the result of hypertrophic cardiomyotopy which is basically a hereditary disease where the heart muscle gets bigger and bigger making the flow of blood obstructed and causing the heart attack. But other people may have been born with something wrong with their hearts which manifests later on in life”.
Dar Shifa is the only private hospital that is fully equipped with a full cardiac team; a cardiac surgeon, cardiac catheterization laboratory, and if a patient walks in anytime of the day or night there’s a consultant ready to take this patient to the right place and have him taken care of, says Dr Mahdi, graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. “It is the most highly equipped cardiac facility in the private sector”.
Exercises
For a healthy heart, both walking and jogging are good exercises. If you want to burn fat, you walk, and if you want to stress your heart to force it to be better you jog. “It depends on how fit you are, if you walk long enough, you can jog”.
Lifestyle and Mediterranean diet reduce blood cholesterol naturally without cholesterol reducing medicines, but if the cholesterol is high because of hereditary reasons, it would be necessary for one to take medications to bring it down.
Dr Mahdi pointed out that the best foods for the heart should include green vegetables, wholesome foods and natural products, whilst the worst foods include red meat, refined foods, hyper diet, and sugar rich products. He further advised the consumption of olive oil over groundnut and sunflower oils, saying that olive is cholesterol free but has high calorie content.”Everybody speaks highly of olive oil because of its cholesterolfree nature, but actually any plant based oil is good”.
On getting heart attack, one needs to immediately chew aspirin, and then get to the nearest hospital as fast as possible. And it’s always better to be driven by someone instead driving yourself to the hospital within one hour. “The Golden Hour is very important when it comes to heart attack”.
The muscles of the arm, legs, take few hours before they die if blood supply is cut, but the heart muscle myocardium, has a high oxygen demand. If the artery supplying the heart muscle stops, it takes less than 60 minutes for the heart muscle to die and this is irreversible. Thus we have the golden hour. There is also door to balloon time. Once the patient enters the ward, they get his heart open by balloon in less than 60 minutes to solve the problem. “The earlier they open up the heart, the better the prognosis for the patient”.
Pain due to heart attack and pain due to gastric trouble, in most instances one cannot tell the difference. But the golden standard according to Dr. Mahdi is if the pain is related to diet, it’s most likely gastric related, but if it is related to effort, then it is most likely heart related. “If the patient walks and gets chest pain, and the pain subsides when he rests, then its heart related”.
Risk
Aspirin decreases the risk of heart attacks. There is a component in the blood called platelets, and aspirin is anti platelet and even some suggest if you take aspirin once daily after the age of forty you decrease your chance of getting a heart attack.
As to why men suffer more heart attacks than women, Dr Mahdi said that coronary heart disease has always been called man’s disease because men have testosterone which accelerates the process. It could also be cultural, in many countries, men are allowed to smoke freely and women are not. In Europe now women have the right to smoke freely so the rate of heart attacks in women has increased substantially.
As to his attraction to Dar Shifa Hospital, Dr Al Mahdi said joining the hospital gives him the pleasure to be able to contribute his skills to help patients in Kuwait achieve their desired results in the field of Internal Medicine and Cardiology, using the hospital’s state of the art equipment.
Dr Mahdi in final words, advised people to have confidence and always seek medical advice from qualified medical personnel and not consult those who do not know.