Dr. Matthew Barrett

Morning, David.

Thanks very much for having me.

I'm sorry I'm not there in the studio, but I'm down here in clinic in Dun Laoghaire, seeing people who haven't been lucky enough to catch their heart problems before causing some issues.

So I'm down here looking after that.

And I suppose, you know, very, very normal what you said about trying to get ahead of these things is really the message you're trying to get out here.

You know, we're well used to the message of if you have chest pain or breath issues, you know, that suggests you might have a heart problem already.

We're all very good at getting that checked out.

But that's also what we're trying to do is move the dial maybe a little bit earlier and actually get ahead of all that happening in the first place.

Well, I mean, we often say as cardiologists that people look after their cars an awful lot better than they look after their bodies.

And the time you want to be getting a car check done is your annual service to get it kind of tuned up and ready so that you're not then all of a sudden broken down to the side of the road.

Preventative heart health is very much identifying those things that could potentially cause you bother down the line and sort of course correcting before you end up running into a major problem.

And I suppose when you look at the data, and we're fortunate in cardiology now that we have it out there,

70 or 80 years of very, very good data following up people who've got these conditions like blood pressure, cholesterol, et cetera, and how they do over time.

And what we know is roughly about half of people will be walking around with something in their bodies, be it blood pressure, cholesterol, undiagnosed diabetes, et cetera, what we call a risk factor for heart disease.

But half of us will have one of those things, and only about half of us will be aware we have it.

And that's really important because if you're not aware of it, you can't treat it, you can't get on top of it, and then potentially you're putting yourself at risk down the line of something acute happening, so having an acute cardiac problem like a heart attack, stroke, and those things that we know can cause heart disease.

lifelong problems going forward.

And in Ireland, about 10,000 people a year will run into some kind of acute heart or cardiovascular issue.

And we know that 80% of those are preventable.

And that's through identification of these risk factors, as you said, lifestyle modifications in the first instance, and then use of medications and very simple things like blood pressure medications, cholesterol medications.