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We think of heart attacks as being traumatic, but it never occurred to me I was having one
“I experienced this strange feeling, but I think if it wasn’t for lockdown, I would have carried on and ignored it,” she says.
It was a Sunday morning during the coronavirus pandemic, when Jean Peet had a heart attack while putting on her walking boots. “I was just so glad I hadn’t left my house – I could have had a heart attack and been lying there for hours, maybe even dead”.
After experiencing this discomfort and feeling uneasy about it, Jean called 999. She was admitted to hospital and was told that what she experienced was a heart attack.
“I was treated at the hospital, but then when I got home, the isolation set in. There were no visits from lockdown, and I was virtually on my own. The anxiety came through and I felt guilty. What had I done to make this happen?”
“It was after discovering The Ticker Tapes podcast where I listened to other women with the same feelings and experiences I had, that I could start recuperating,” Jean explains.
Determined to get fit again, Jean is now doing her 10,000 daily steps once more and has even taken up Pilates.
Predicting heart attacks
“It’s stories like Jean’s that motivates us in our research,” explains Professor Charalambos Antoniades, British Heart Foundation Chair of the Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford. Professor Antoniades’ research has been funded by the BHF since 2011, during which time he developed CaRi-Heart® - a ground-breaking AI-based cardiovascular prediction technology that can identify people at high risk of a heart attack years before they strike.
Heart attacks can happen when there is a sudden loss of blood flow to the heart muscle. They usually occur due to coronary heart disease, where the arteries that supply blood to the heart become narrowed by a build-up of fatty material. When these fatty deposits break, they can cause a clot. The clot can move and obstruct the blood flow to the heart muscle which can cause the tissue to die.
Coronary heart disease kills more than twice as many women as breast cancer in the UK every year, and every 5 minutes someone in the UK is admitted to hospital due to a heart attack.
Professor Antoniades’ research has shown that there is a link between arteries at risk of a heart attack and the characteristics of fat tissue that surrounds them (called perivascular adipose tissue). This prompted them to look at whether these changes could be detected using a heart angiogram – the most common scan for chest pains. Using a computer algorithm, the team analysed information on the fat tissue from the angiograms, as well as the patient’s medical history. This enabled them to identify whether one person is more vulnerable to a heart attack than another.
This new technology is currently being tested in the NHS, and Professor Antoniades’ and his team hope to have a true impact on healthcare in the near future and help save many lives.
Do you want to hear more from Professor Charalambos Antoniades and Jean Peet?
Watch our Live & Ticking event