The science and philosophy of a heartbeat

Our greatest triumph lies in preventing heart disease rather than treating it

Each year on September 27, we celebrate World Heart Day, marking it with a grim reiteration of the global rise in cardiovascular diseases. According to the World Heart Federation, 18.6 million people die annually from cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). In the UAE, 40 per cent of all deaths are due to heart disease, and nearly 50 per cent of heart patients in the country are below 50. It's a scary scenario.How can we bring these numbers down and banish this tormenting sense of déjà vu?

Preventive care is the best weapon to fight the rise in cardiovascular diseases. While advances in treating CVDs play a pivotal role in helping heart patients control and manage their health, it is essentially a reactive approach, a reality in medical care that is inevitable but in urgent need of a review.

Prevention is the greatest gift you can give your heart. But heart disease statistics reveal how far we have drifted from that essential goal. The challenge for healthcare entities, governments and health monitoring bodies is to wean people off their damaging lifestyles through awareness and education to create a synergy of positive outcomes.

Helping patients eliminate, control, or minimise factors that put them at risk of heart diseases like smoking, high blood pressure, cholesterol, obesity, stress, and lifestyle must remain healthcare's core pursuit.

Healthcare entities and cardiac care professionals must stay alert to the widening ripples of heart health information through new findings, research, the latest interventional methodologies, and emerging evidence-based treatments. Simultaneously, they must return to the basics and seek complete knowledge about a patient's heart philosophy.

Medicine and healthcare have for too long focused on the heart's illnesses; we now need to understand once again why the heart falls ill in the first place. The heart is the body's strongest muscle and the most emotionally fraught and vulnerable entity inside a human, and grasping both sides of this coin is the open secret to winning the war on cardiac diseases.

PRIME Healthcare is ahead of the curve and takes an informed approach to heart health. We embed preventive care at the heart of our multi-layered, in-depth, empathic cardiac care programme. For example:

Our best-in-class heart specialists conduct the 56-view Echo Test compared to the dated Echo test module of 10-views.

The centre also offers advanced intervention cardiology techniques such as balloon angioplasty and stenting.

Dr. Jamil Ahmed, Managing Director of PRIME Hospital and PRIME Healthcare Group, said: "Our dedicated Heart Care Centre and Department of Cardiology follow emerging cardiac care processes and compassionate inclusivity of the patient's concerns and outlook. Our team of heart specialists, cardiologists, interventional cardiologists, heart surgeons and consultants lead top-class cardiac treatments and management, maintaining our status as one of the best hospitals in Dubai. We will further consolidate our status with the PRIME Heart and Lung Hospital."

We are also building the PRIME Heart and Lung Hospital in Dubai Healthcare City Phase 2, a milestone tertiary care facility with three centres of excellence in heart, lung, and oncology.

The hospital's Heart Care Center of Excellence will offer a range of non-invasive and invasive diagnostic and interventional procedures for coronary disease, valve disorders, structural heart disorders, and arrhythmias. The hospital will also offer cardiac rehabilitation services in addition to electrophysiology, cardiac physiology, and complex cardiac interventions.

PRIME Healthcare Group's non-invasive cardiac care diagnostics services cover:

PRIME Hospital's advanced Department of Cardiology has a fully equipped Cardiac Care Unit with state-of-the-art Cath labs and coronary care units. It offers the following services:

Non-Invasive Cardiology Procedures

Invasive Cardiology Procedures

PRIME Heart and Lung Hospital

The PRIME Heart and Lung Hospital is one more iteration of our commitment to combine predictive methods with our world-class cardiac specialists' advanced diagnosis, treatment, and procedures to understand the patient's heart health subjectivity.

PRIME emphasises the latter because it is a timeless best practice, a holistic pursuit, and a healthcare entity's ultimate responsibility. Patient subjectivity in heart health is not new; it's as old as humankind. But it is back to claim its place after the pandemic highlighted the need to study our responses to heart health anew.

Patients' feelings about their hearts and health are integral to the cardiac care journey. This subjectivity, or the experience of symptoms, is as critical to understanding and treating the patient as employing objective heartcare markers such as BP, BMI, diet, stress, and cardiac events.

It is no exaggeration to say the symptoms caucus is largely viewed for its medical import, but the patient's response to their condition in heart health is crucial to achieving the desired outcome. Their response determines the why, how, and when of their understanding of heart health. It is critical data that opens doors to many positive results.

PRIME Hospital's heartcare philosophy is based on this understanding. Our Department of Cardiology and our advanced Heart Care Centre studies the medical facts about the patient's heart condition and their psycho-emotional matrix. We are committed to syncing patients' heart health subjectivity and medical objectivity to deliver the most effective and compassionate care outcomes.

With this blended approach, the urgency to continually educate people on the correct response to potential heart problem symptoms such as chest pain, breathlessness, and discomfort can turn the tide on delayed cardiac interventions and unnecessary deaths.

PRIME's state-of-the-art Heart Care Center specialises in acute chest pains that are alarmingly high in the UAE. With comprehensive in-patient and out-patient services, complete diagnostic support, our world-class catheterisation laboratory, intensive care unit (ICU) and a coronary care unit (CCU), the centre offers 24/7 cardiac monitoring, total patient care before and after angiography, pacemaker implantation and primary angioplasty.