February is American Heart Month. Understanding more about care and prevention when it comes to heart health is vitally important. Dr. William Gill joined us for a Q&A about heart health for the benefit of our readers. Take a moment to read and consider whether you may need to make some changes when it comes to your daily habits. Stay healthy everyone!
- Tell us about your background, any anecdotes about living in Hendricks County.
I grew up in New Jersey and then went to high school in Charlotte, North Carolina. I went to Notre Dame as an undergrad and haven’t left Indiana since. I met my wife at Notre Dame. My wife is a pediatrician, also in Hendricks County. She’s right across the hall from me at IU Health West. We have four kids, ages 20 to 26. They’re all in college or grad school at this point in time and doing well for themselves.
As far as working in Hendricks County, it’s been a phenomenal experience for me. Since the hospital opened, we’ve grown our practice at IU Health West. We started out with two exam rooms, here two days a week. The space that we’re in, suite 141, has almost 25 exam rooms now, and we’re here every day. The practice has really grown up and I’ve been fortunate enough to be there, really from the very beginning. - What similarities and differences are there when it comes to heart health in men and women?
While there is definitely a push to define the differences, I don’t want to understate the fact that women can have very typical symptoms of heart attack, and they should not be ignored. They can get chest pain, heaviness, pressure in the mid chest, and sometimes that radiates up into the neck or the jaw, down an arm or goes across their back. They can have associated symptoms like nauseousness, breaking out in a sweat or getting short of breath. Those are all the symptoms that we would find in the classic textbook of cardiovascular medicine if somebody were having a heart attack.
Now, it is definitely the case that about 20% of all heart attacks are silent, meaning that the individuals do not realize that they even had a heart attack, and so they can be almost completely asymptomatic and still have a heart attack.
There are less typical symptoms, where maybe some people might just get fatigue and shortness of breath, or they’ll get nauseousness and vomiting, maybe some aching in an arm or across their back, and they just won’t recognize it for what it is. They’ll gut it out at home, and then ultimately learn that maybe they were having a heart attack for a period of time. Those less common symptoms seem a little bit more prevalent in women than in men.
- What resources do you recommend for people interested in improving their lifestyles regarding heart health?
There’s a number of prongs to our approach with regard to prevention and things that we can do for ourselves. One thing is to try to eat a healthy diet. Today, nutrition science is pointing us toward a plant-based or Mediterranean style of diet, where we incorporate some fresh fish, plenty of beans, legumes, nuts, whole grains, as well as fruits and vegetables on the regular in our diet. We should try to avoid greasy fried foods where possible. I think there’s probably an understanding that refined carbohydrates, foods that are very high in added sugars and things like this, while they’re super fun and sweet and awesome to eat, we really should try to limit those sorts of things as much as possible. One of the websites I point a lot of my patients toward is a website called myplate.gov. It is by the US Department of Agriculture, and it’s an excellent resource.
Another part of it is exercise and activity. Going out for a long, maybe brisk or moderate pace walk when you’re able to most days of the week for 30 to 60 minutes is helpful. That’s cardiovascular health. It gets the heart rate up a little bit, uses our muscles to propel our body in space. I’m a big fan of resistance training also, for all of us, not just for heart health, but for total body health, to stay strong throughout our lives.
Never smoking, of course, is another part. If you smoke, stop. If you don’t, never start. That’s really important for all of us from a heart health perspective as well.
- What challenges have you seen overcome over time?
When I started in my fellowship training back in 2000, when people had heart attacks, we gave them clot busting medications. These were used to try to break up clots that presumably were blocking the heart arteries, the blood flow to the heart. It became evident by clinical trial data that doing a heart catheterization emergently in the setting of a heart attack may be superior, both safety and efficacy wise, to giving these clot busting medications. It took a lot of work and a lot of effort by people here at IU Health, across our state, nationally and worldwide to get to the point where we consider and treat heart attacks as the medical emergency that they are.
IU Health West has the only 24/7 catheterization lab in Hendricks County, so if you come into our hospital with a heart attack, then you’re going to get excellent and very expedited care.
- Anything you would like to add or reference for our readers?
When we have a greater appetite for prevention, sometimes doing more than just the things we can do for ourselves is appropriate. And for some people, that may include being on medications to more optimally control blood pressure and to more optimally manage cholesterol levels.