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When I learnt I had FH it was like someone hit me in the face
Jan Barton-Wolfe always thought that she was fit and healthy – she ran with her dogs on most days and had a balanced diet, so never in a million years did she think that there was something wrong.
It all changed when her cousin, Kate, died suddenly of a heart attack at age 20. “It was totally out of the blue – we were at her wedding ten months before and she’d just had a beautiful baby girl. It took a while for us all to accept what happened,” Jan explains.
Kate died of a condition called familial hypercholesterolaemia, or FH – an inherited condition where you have exceptionally high levels of cholesterol in your blood. “Kate’s death meant we all got genetic testing to see if others also had FH. Sadly, 16 of us tested positive for the faulty gene, and that included myself and my two daughters,” she says.
There isn’t a cure for FH, but it can be treated successfully with cholesterol-lowering drugs like statins, which is what Jan has been prescribed. “I can honestly say that I haven’t changed my lifestyle at all – I now just take a statin every single day and continue to live my life to the full.”
Statins save lives
High cholesterol is associated with 1 in 4 heart and circulatory disease deaths in the UK, but when the BHF was born in 1961, doctors didn’t know just how dangerous it could be to have high levels of this fatty substance in our blood.In the 1970s, it was shown that lowering cholesterol was a good strategy to decrease the risk of heart attack and stroke. Then, in the 1980s, cholesterol-lowering statins were recognised and in the 1990s, two of our researchers set out to prove the power of these new pills.
The West of Scotland Coronary Prevention Study (WOSCOPS) clinical trial, led by BHF Professor Stuart Cobbe, showed that statins cut the risk of heart attack and death from heart and circulatory diseases by a quarter. But the progress didn’t stop there.
The BHF/MRC (Medical Research Council) Heart Protection Study, led by BHF Professor Sir Rory Collins, followed over 20,000 people with existing coronary heart disease or diabetes over another period of five years.
“We further proved that statins cut the risk of heart attack, stroke or death from heart disease by 25% regardless of their cholesterol levels at the start of the trial. This was the big difference from WOSCOPS and other trials in showing benefit in people at increased risk who had average or even below-average cholesterol levels,” Professor Sir Collins explains.
“It also showed that the benefits were similar for women as well as men (too few women had been studied in the other trials), for older people as well as middle-aged (with previous trials having tended to exclude the elderly) and in people with diabetes (who were not previously considered to be at risk due to elevated cholesterol levels). The Heart Protection Study also provided the first compelling evidence that lowering cholesterol with statins reduced the risk of ischaemic strokes as well as coronary events.”
Both of these world-leading studies have helped to prove the power of statins as a way to prevent and treat heart and circulatory diseases, and it is these drugs that are helping to keep countless people alive today – people like Jan and her two daughters.
Do you want to hear more from BHF Professor Sir Rory Collins and Jan Barton-Wolfe?