About 10% of chest pain admissions to hospitals are related to drug use, heath committee told
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About 10% of heart patients admitted to one of the country's largest hospitals are suffering from illegal drug use with “one or two” cocaine-related heart patients weekly, the Oireachtas Health Committee has heard.
Doctors in the Irish Cardiac Society also described how patients can wait up to two years for scans due to shortages of specialist staff.
Professor Brendan McAdam, president of the society and cardiologist at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, said drug use is a serious problem.
“My colleagues and myself will see people once or twice a week coming in with cocaine-related chest pain, cocaine-related heart attack,” he said.
It is not possible to give a precise number he told People before Profit TD Gino Kenny, but he estimated: “I would probably say about 10% of our chest pain admissions may be directly or indirectly related to drug use.”
He agreed this is “quite high”, adding that these patients also face a risk of sudden death and can have “significant heart damage”.
One of his patients affected in this way is on “life-saving treatment, they have a defibrillator and they’re only 29. They may end up with a transplant in the future”.
“Alcohol has a huge impact on adverse cardiovascular outcomes,” he also said.
“And indeed it has a huge impact on cancer outcomes as well, obesity, poor diet, and it leads to hypertension and significant health problems, significant heart and liver problems.”
Overall every year nearly 9,000 people in Ireland lose their lives to various heart diseases, the society said.
It is the second most common reason for all deaths in Ireland, with smoking and high cholesterol levels also risk factors.
In Ireland, more women die from cardiovascular disease than all cancers combined, and they are more likely to die after a heart attack than men but remain “significantly under-represented” in research.
Outgoing president Prof Pascal McKeown said “Ireland has the lowest number of cardiologists per million population across the EU” despite these serious concerns.
Shortages of therapists to aid recovery and rehabilitation are also at crisis levels.
Half of rehabilitation teams have not had a psychologist for ten years, the committee also heard.
A key problem is there is no national cardiovascular strategic plan to guide development of services, he said.
Dr Niamh Murphy, Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, said patients face delays in having scans due to the “very limited access” to specialist machines because of staff shortages.
“If you take the 33 hospitals that admit chest pain (patients) only 11 of these have access to cardiac CT, only six have access to cardiac MRI,” she said.
She told Green Party health spokeswoman Neasa Hourigan: “The waiting list for ECHO can be up to one year, and for MRI is over two years”.
Patients in some areas can access tests more quickly, she said, but overall they see “very excessive waiting lists”.
GPs can refer patients to community hubs for ECHO scans, but she said the hubs “don’t have staffing in place even though they may have the equipment”.