Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

NNSL (May 08/98) - Despite new life-extending medications such as the cholesterol-buster Pravachol, Yellowknifers are having heart attacks with increasing regularity.

In 1996, Stanton Hospital admitted 26 patients for heart attacks or unstable angina.

In 1997, that number rose to 44, and with 1998 less than half completed, the hospital has already logged 20 cases.

"People don't realize the symptoms and it's already too late when they are put on these treatments," said manager of medical services Jodi Blundon.

"Lots of times the damage is done," she said. "They wait too long before they come with the chest pain, but (new treatments are) helping people after the fact."

Controllable risk factors for heart attacks are smoking, high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, a lack of physical activity and stress.

Uncontrollable factors are heredity, increasing age, diabetes and being male.

The single most damaging heath risk is smoking because nicotine causes the heart to beat faster while simultaneously constricting blood vessels.

Brian McCluskey, 59, said his heart problems started Labor Day weekend, when he was helping the Rotary Club clean up the Back Bay cemetery.

"It felt like indigestion but the tightness was bad so it seemed pretty intense for indigestion," he said in his Arctic Energy Alliance ofÞce.

To be safe, he went to the hospital, was kept there for three days and when he was released his doctor suggested he go to Edmonton for an angiogram.

Within two weeks he had a heart attack and the months-long wait for a visit to Edmonton's Royal Alexander Hospital suddenly shortened.

"You don't feel anything," McCluskey said of the test, in which doctors slit an artery leading to the heart and insert a wire. "You can watch it on a TV screen."

Doctors then squirt tracer œuid into the blood and any blockage shows on the screen.

To widen arteries clogged with cholesterol, tiny balloons are attached to the wire and then expanded to restore proper blood œow.

McCluskey, who now says he feels "fabulous," had arteries that were 85 per cent blocked.

He has changed his diet since his heart attack to exclude high cholesterol foods.

Part of the diet change has come from his supportive wife Stephanie, who has bought several new healthy living cookbooks.

"I have one A&W burger a year," McCluskey said. "On my birthday."

For people who have had heart problems over the past year, a new support group called Open Heart is holding its Þrst meeting May 26.