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'A New Way to Examine the Heart'

Ajit Jain in Toronto

An Indian-American cardiologist has pioneered a new method of examining the heart.

Dr. Navin C Nanda, professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said this involved looking at the "heart from top to bottom, " and trials were already on at the Echocardiography and Heart Station at Alabama, of which he is the director.

Addressing the third annual meeting of the joint American Association of Cardiologists of Indian Origin (AACIO) and Association of Black Cardiologists (ABC) of America that concluded at Toronto's King Edward Hotel on Saturday, he said that this meant that "even if there's a minimal change in the pumping function (of the heart) we will be able to register immediately and we can treat it.

"In the new thing that we are just developing, we have just started testing on a few patients at Alabama," he explained.

They are also looking at "three dimensions, as the heart is three dimensional. We are using a new agent which will be injected in the heart intravenously and then we can tell which area of the heart has good blood supply and which area doesn't, to check risk of a heart attack," he added.

Nanda who has 700 scientific publications to his credit, has been named in several citations as "the world's best and most respected echocardiographer" and a "legend in his own time," whose "pioneering work has changed the way cardiology is practiced in the world today." His name appears in the book The Best Doctors in America.

Nanda said that at an earlier International Heart conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba, it had been pointed out that the incidence of heart disease and deaths due to cardiac arrest was very high among people from the developing nations.

"the exact reason for this high frequency of heart attacks in Asian Indians is not completely understood but obesity, modern life style, pollution, diabetes, high blood pressure, smoking and high cholesterol levels are some of the more well-known factors which have been implicated," Nanda said.

Dr. Inder S Anand, Director of Heart Failure Clinic, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, agreed. Indians hardly exercise, eat fat rich food and are heavy smokers, and all these are serious risk factors for cardiac complications, he said.

People who have moved from rural to urban areas are having heart complications again for the same reasons as once they move to cities they stop exercising. A farmer is healthier primarily because he is constantly on the move, he concluded.

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