Heart disease in our population

In a recent study, it showed that the mean age of Malaysian population getting heart disease is about 59 yrs old, which is 6 years younger compared to mean age of European population.

Heart disease, or coronary heart disease (CHD) has been a serious health problem in Malaysia, as well as for worldwide nations. Most clinicians consider that family risk history, hypertension, diabetes, smoking and poor diet are the conventional risk factors that cause the CHD. However, how can we explain a young patient, who is only 30 yr old that got an acute heart disease when he has none of any history of the above conventional factors?

Recent years, more and more young patients admitted to hospital with a higher risk of CHD, and we called it as Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS). The ACS is a complex complication, and it involves a sudden chest pain, blockage of arteries and thus causing heart ischemia, which is the heart muscle will lack of oxygen and eventually cause heart failure. This explains why some people get heart attack and suddenly die.

It's by far interesting to know what are the reasons of more and more young people getting these ACS problems. Is it because of our social culture that make us more susceptible to be attacked by these diseases?

Based on the annual report of National Cardiovascular Disease (NCVD) Database, some statistics show that:

1. About 40% of patients do not smoke

2. About 49% of patients do not have family history of heart disease

3. More than 50% patients do not have myocardial infarction/heart attack, means the ACS happened to them is all by sudden

4. More than 70% of patients are Male!

5. Most of the patients have high BMI value, above normal value (>23)

6. 36% patients do not have diabetes

7. 23% patients do not have hypertension

8. More than 80% patients do not have most co-morbidity, such as renal disease, chronic lung disease, diabetes, hypertension, heart failure, etc.

Obviously, it's getting more people to be susceptible by the ACS, even we claim ourselves to live healthily, no smoking habit, not alcoholic, it may still happen to us.

Of all, public should aware about these data and change their lifestyles, since hypertension, overweight and smoking is still a common risk factor for CHD.

Be aware, love our heart!

The conference

I was back, finally.

This whole month wasn't a good month for me, i fell sick again and again!

Last weekend went to KL to attend the conference. The conference is big, and held in a grand luxurious big hotel in Sunway. It's just next to Sunway Lagoon.

Photo taken from the hotel

But not as crowded as we thought of, in fact, it's quite empty. Don't know how much the money that organizer has put on.

Empty seats everywhere

Forget about how luxurious, how comfy the place is, and how nice the food they provide, all for a while the conference was aim to share clinical research ideas. For big people, they wanted to make money. So, they invited some drug companies join them as exhibitors, and invited top speakers from NUS, UM and other institutions to chair the symposium.

For me, my task was to networking and learn more about the legal act, ethics, protocols and etc that concern about the clinical research, which my company is aiming to. In fact, i got to know somebody, like the head of department from other states, key persons in CRC kl and etc. Speak about the knowledge part, it's abit dry. Especially in legal act part, most speakers were telling us the things that we actually can access to thru their homepage.

Instead of hoping them to share some research ideas and present their research data, this conference trip had upset me. Most speakers pinpointed to us why Malaysia is a good place for clinical trial industry, yet they didn't show us how to do and make us towards this way. Apparently, the conference talked more abt on administrative parts, the research works became less concerned.

Despite all these, i must say i did learnt something from this conference. Especially in new definition on: Pharmacogenomic, Good Laboratory Practice, and SOP. Thru this conference, i finally get to know that it's not easy to run a clinical practice research, somemore to incorporate the Basic science together with Clinical research is a tough task for all of us.

Anyway, things must change and we should follow the step of our global countries. If other people can do it, why not us. Again, i do wish the similar conference for next year can be run better, at least to investigators and student researchers like us, to feel we're worth to pay the air fares to join.

World Heart Day'08 at The Spring

This morning i worked as volunteer for World Heart Day' 08 Health Screening exhibition at The Spring shopping mall. I arrived there ard 830am, and not ready with any warm up yet, slightly near 9 o'clock, i can see the crowd lined up at the registration counter.

It was abit mess at the early start, and the people supposed to line up and wait for their turns, instead of this most of the crowds came to the test counters themselves after registration. Just take as example, mine counter (measure for Body Mass Index: BMI) should be the last second counter for all people after they taking the blood pressure, total cholesterol and glucose tests. Yet, most crowd thought (or confused?) the exit entrance is the first entrance, so they all rushed in to mine counter to take their BMI measurement. The normal flow route should be as below diagram:


Anyway, this little mess finally getting controlled and we can get our "customers" have their testing one by one in fair, and more discipline manner. During this health screening, most of the nurses from SGH cardiac clinic, some pharmacists and some from our CRC department were the volunteers. The main aim of this exhibition is increase the public awareness of cardiovascular risk, therefore through this health screening we believe it can help the public know more about their health status, based on blood pressure, cholesterol level, obese etcs as these factors can indirectly affect the most population with heart disease. With that, the exhibition even sent a few doctors as consultants for our "customers" after their health screening. These doctors would explain and suggest the way to avoid if the "customer" is in high risk.

Anyhow i feel this exhibition has succeed as more and more people nowadays are getting aware about their health. Like today, though 75% above were elderly, we had some young adults to spend some time to join this free health screening. This is good.

I also measured mine at the end of today's health screening. My blood pressure is normal, just the pulse rate abit too high (May be i get too excited?), normal cholesterol (4.8 mm Hg) and glucose level. I sastified all these results, except one thing: my BMI! Can you imagine, it was just 16.4! It's nearly underweight category if i have it below 15. And my waist only 60 cm. O.o''

My plan over the weekend

It has been a while i didn't update my blog. I just too lazy. =) Recently is quite busy with ammending the proposals, and preparing the relevant documents for my master application in unimas. Hope i can get my proposal finalized by my boss and apply it on next week before i continue my another busy week.

Next week from Fri to Sun, i'll be the volunteer for the World Heart Day'08 community project at The Spring shopping mall. Basically i'll help out for the registration and welcome people for cardiovascular screening. As since the World Heart Day is far concerned to increase public awareness of heart disease, so we have this free cardiovascular screening for the first 300 ppl who register. The screening will help to check your cholesterol level, blood pressure and other lipid levels (i.e. LDL, HDL etc). The main aim of this screening is to let the public knows their risk of getting heart disease, thus after all this checking, it helps public know how to change their lifestyle so as to avoid the risk.

After the cardiovascular screening on Fri and Sat morning (from 9 til 12pm), one public health talk will be organized as well, in Swinburne Sarawak campus on Sat afternoon (18th oct), 2pm. Both speakers are from cardiology department SGH. Besides, a jogging campaign (Walk A Mile campaign) at MBKS, Kuching on Sun morning (19th Oct) also included as one of the functions of World Heart Day'08 community project, and i think i'll go for it too, just to grab my free t-shirt and healthy breakfast! lol.. jk jk.

On sun after the jogging campaign, i will rush for my flight to KL for 3 days conference. I shall be back to Kuching on 22nd Oct night, and then start my normal routine working life on the next day. Aww, it's gonna be a tiring week, anyway it's worth to sacrifice for it.

For those of you who are in Kuching that time, join us for any of the functions. And for those you're not, remember to join any similar functions in your place, especially the health screening one. It's time to take care our health, we're actually not that young anymore. Haha.

Trip to Bau and Sematan

This time we head to Sematan, and dropped by at Bau on the way.

Sematan is well known for its beautiful blue seaview and fresh seafood. It is located at 105 km away from Kuching, and will take about 1.5 hrs to reach there. This is not our first time to Sematan, but it's indeed a place we should never miss out and a must-go place.

Along the road trip to Sematan, we stopped by at Bau, another small town in Kuching district. It is just 40km away from Kuching and is most known as the Gold town since it was the gold mining site in Sarawak long time ago.

This is the Blue Lake (Tasik Biru), Bau. This lake is formed from a gold mining site, that's y no one is allowed to swim here since it is of arsenic contamination. That's one temple nearby the lake, and we didn't spend much of time there because everywhere got "bom" (the doggy's poops)!



So we head to another new tourist spot in Bau, a Rock Garden minizoo. The entrance fee costs us RM8, and inside got many small animals to see like birds, monkeys, porcupines, some horses and etc. Not much interesting anyway.



But that's one fun thing about this minizoo is they had a small cave inside the zoo, and the owner decorated it well with some artificial rocks and placed spotlights to make it looks incredible. We ever found a Snake inside the cave that suddenly showed up to scare us! lolz. Luckily it didn't attack us.



We spent 2 hrs exploring in Bau, then we continued our road trip to seafood paradise: the Sematan. And, we had our own made sandwiches for our lunches. We bought some crabs for our dinner and spent a while at the Sematan beachs, wondering around, taking some silly photos and collecting seashells. That's we ended our weekend trip.




RM 4 per kg for the crabs and we plain steamed them for our dinner. Just the crabs, no rice and no other things, it took me so long to finish them.. lolz. It's yummy, sweet, many meats and real fresh!