Dr Somnath shares some interesting insights about heart care

Know how to take care of your heart from Dr Somnath

Journey with heart disease

Living with a heart condition can mean coming to terms with what’s happened and how different aspects of your life may be affected.

Coping after a diagnosis of heart disease

You may experience various types of emotional distress or behavioural disturbance. Problems such as depression and anxiety are especially common. These conditions not only affect your emotional state but can also impact your symptoms of heart disease.

Fortunately, there are effective treatments for depression and anxiety available, including psychological interventions and antidepressant medication. 

Cardiac rehabilitation

Many hospitals have a cardiac rehabilitation program, run by cardiac rehabilitation nurses and physiotherapists, which will help you regain your fitness and confidence as well as providing you with information and advice after a heart attack, heart surgery or

Cardiac rehabilitation helps you:

• understand your condition
• recover from your procedure, surgery or heart attack
• make changes to your lifestyle to protect your heart
• reduce the risk of further problems

Continuing to manage your heart condition

It’s very important to continue to attend any appointments - these are a very useful way of keeping an eye on how you are, your overall health and your heart condition.

Routine assessments

Usually, you’ll have annual blood tests taken, and this may be more frequent, especially after initial drug treatments.

Hospital assessments

You may be asked to have an ECG (electrocardiogram) taken and sometimes additional assessments made in more specialized situations.

Medication

You may have been prescribed medications for a heart condition. This can be challenging for some people, especially if you have never had to take medications before. There are many types of medications that may be prescribed. Although these can seem similar, it’s vital that you only take your own medications and don’t stop these without medical advice.

Self-management

For some people, an episode of living with a heart condition may be short-lived. However, for most patients, it will change the way they live their life. It could also affect family and friends.

If you’re living with a heart condition, you may wish to make changes, either major or minor, to your lifestyle.

Returning to work

You may have a period of cardiac rehabilitation following a diagnosis of a heart condition or heart disease before returning to work. This will depend, mainly, on the type of work you do, and the physical and mental activity required - for example, manual labour or a desk job.

Relationships

Relationships with partners can be very important in supporting the person who is living with heart disease, as can relationships with friends and family.

Palliative care (relieving problem without dealing with the cause)

As in other long-term conditions, there are some people whose heart disease advances despite treatments, and a different approach to ongoing care is required. If symptoms are becoming resistant to conventional treatment, supportive and palliative care symptom control measures may be needed.

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