India lagging far behind US & Europe in managing heart failure patients

Heart failure patients are dying in India due to lack of basic knowledge

New Delhi, June 30: India may already be claiming attaining global standard of treatment of heart but the irony is it is yet to learn basic knowledge of management of heart failure patients.

This in turn leads to deaths of over 30 percents of those heart failure patients who would have been saved had they been in US or Europe. All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) has owned up this inadequacy in Indian doctors in its ‘Journal of Practice of Cardiovascular Sciences’, a new journal started by the Department of Cardiology at AIIMS. The journal has published the findings of a new heart failure registry compiled by the institute.

To plug these gaps in knowledge, AIIMS has created a lab journal for practical and theoretical aspect of cardiovascular sciences, in collaboration with School of Life Sciences of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).

The registry has revealed that one-third of heart failure patients who report to AIIMS die during treatment itself. Another as many patients die due to complications developed within within six months of being discharged. According to registry, the number of patients who die of heart failure at AIIMS is 30.8 per cent compared to 4-7 per cent in the US and Europe.

Heart failure patients reporting to AIIMS are also much younger than in the West with a mean age of 53 years against 65-73 years in Europe and the US. Dr. Sandeep Seth, Cardiology professor at the institute and editor of the journal says ‘This is an indication of how sick the patients are when they report to us. Basic knowledge of managing heart failure or detecting the disease at an early stage is missing, so it is difficult to manage them in the hospital. Among those we treat successfully and who get discharged, compliance to precautions like salt and fat intake and medicine compliance is so poor that they end up developing complications, which may be fatal.’