Heart Attack Prevention

The Heart Initiative

Take the initiative with your own heart health through earlier plaque detection, clearer risk assessment, and more effective prevention.

The Heart Initiative is a heart disease prevention program which informs and encourages individuals and their doctors to take effective action to prevent heart attacks, the world’s leading cause of death and the leading cause of sudden death.

It is clearly understood that plaque or atherosclerosis is the underlying culprit predisposing to heart attack and the early detection of this plaque and its effective management is the key to prevention.

Current medical guidelines advise doctors to start a prevention assessment with a “cardiovascular risk calculator”. In the USA the latest ones developed are called Prevent and the Pooled Cohort equation. In Australia there is the Australian Cardiovascular Risk Calculator and in Europe it is called Score. Whist well-intentioned, these are highly inaccurate both underestimating risk – especially in younger patients and overestimating risk particularly in older patients.

The inaccuracy of these calculators is not surprising as they only include a small number of important factors that can contribute to plaque, but do not take into account many others. Staff in Coronary Care Units are well aware of these failings with only about 50% of presenting heart attack victims having had any of the so-called traditional risk factors previously identified.

We have developed a “personal risk-profile score” to take the wide range of important traditional and non-traditional risk factors into account, not to try to predict risk as these calculators are intended, but to inform us who will most benefit from plaque testing which indeed more reliably predicts risk because it is the demonstration of the actual disease.

Unfortunately, many people do not have a regular GP or primary care physician at all. For people who do, having an effective heart check especially that includes plaque testing is rare. This is because the organisations responsible for training these doctors continue to teach and encourage the entrenched view to start with these inaccurate calculators and they have been very slow to advise plaque testing. When they do it is only “when a doctor is uncertain” about management.

Yet, this goes against basic medical teaching of diagnosis before management, and no doctor can be certain without such an assessment. Believe it or not, when most doctors prescribe a statin or other drugs for high cholesterol in well patients with no cardiac history, a diagnosis of plaque has seldom been made.

The Heart Initiative is a call to action for patients and ideally their doctors to take the initiative with their own heart health, both in terms of plaque diagnosis and then effective management if required, of which the keys are dietary and holistic lifestyle changes.