Feb. 21 -- February being Heart Health Month, it's a chance to raise awareness of early heart attack care, hands-only CPR and heart failure awareness to name a few.
Gracie Smith, chest pain coordinator at Medical Center Hospital, is in the forefront.
Director of Public Relations Trevor Tankersley puts information on social media, but Smith and colleagues also sit outside the cafeteria and provide information to staff members and visitors.
This week was Heart Valve Disease Awareness Week, but it also raises attention to anything heart related such as high cholesterol. Blood pressure screenings were offered to see that staff members' blood pressure was within range.
If Odessa Fire Rescue goes to events to teach CPR, they sometimes invite Smith. She went to STEM Academy to provide hands-only CPR training at the end of January and she'll take part in another CPR community education event at the end of February.
The American Heart Association promotes Life's Essential 8. These are eight behaviors and heart health topics that people can do to prevent heart disease and heart attacks.
"Those are eating better, so incorporating more color into your diet, the good lean proteins and the healthy fats, being more active. The recommendation is that all adults, or anyone over 14, gets at least two and a half hours a week of moderate activity. One of the others is sleeping, getting adequate sleep, seven to nine hours is the recommendation; quitting tobacco, that's a big one," Smith said.
"I try to emphasize that the patients that we see that come in with emergent heart attacks, a lot of times, they may have no health history that they're aware of. The only thing that they have in their history is that they're a smoker, so that one's a big one, and not supplementing cigarettes for vaping.
"A lot of people think that could be a good trade; definitely not. It's the nicotine that's in there that makes your heart rate jump up, so makes your heart work harder. Those are the behaviors," Smith added.
The other things you should do is manage your high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
"A normal blood pressure range is 120 over 80. You want to stay in that happy number there. When you hit 140 to 150 that's where you're really needing to be on medication. If you're at 180 you need to come to the emergency room, on the top number. Your cholesterol, we try to teach that you want your HDLs. We call those your happy cholesterol. You want those to be high, and you want your lousy cholesterol or your LDL to be low. The way you do that is by not eating Chick-fil-A and all the saturated, yummy, deep fried foods. If you have diabetes you want to manage that. The goal that they've set for diabetic patients is to have an A1c under 7%," Smith said.
Watching your weight is another preventative measure. The optimal Body Mass Index is 19 to 25.
"You're able to manage all of those disease processes by eating right, exercising, sleeping well," Smith said.
She added that having a good support system of family members that will practice healthy behaviors with you makes things easier.
"If you have family members that'll get involved with you in doing the healthy behaviors that you need to do to help your heart, I think that makes a big difference," Smith said.
Women experience chest pain in the same way as men -- the crushing tightness and pressure you feel in your chest.
"Both men and women experience that, but women tend to experience additional symptoms. It can be very vague as having the flu, being nauseated. A lot of times, you'll get pain right in between your shoulder blades and your back for women, and then the classical symptoms of feeling pain on the left arm, like men usually will have pain on the left side. Women, I say because we're always right, tend to feel pain on the right side. So right arm, right shoulder, right jaw. (The) jaw is a big one, but they both experience chest pain. It's just women have additional symptoms that can be easily dismissed as other things going on. The other bad thing for women is if they were to collapse and their heart were to stop beating, bystanders are less likely to provide CPR to a woman than they are to a man, more worried about fears of accusations being on the chest," Smith said.
Women also are more predisposed to having heart disease, Smith said, "so we're more likely to be the ones that need CPR."
She added that one in three women will be affected by cardiovascular disease. For men, it's one in four or one in four-and-a-half.
"It has to do with the hormonal makeup of our bodies," Smith said.
"In an emergent situation, things to look for would definitely be the chest pain. That's your classic symptom. You don't want to delay seeking treatment, even if it's chest pain that comes and goes. Sometimes it can come and go for weeks at a time before it actually turns into a full-blown heart attack, but you want to get some sort of treatment. Make sure you're seeing your health care providers so they can do additional testing," Smith said.
"You definitely want to call EMS. They have all the emergent equipment and the emergent medications that you would need if your heart were to stop on your way to the hospital," she added. "They can give you that aspirin early. They have access to oxygen, they can do an EKG to see if you are having an emergent, what we call a STEMI, or an emergent heart attack, where we would need to bring you to the cath lab right away," she added.
STEMI stands for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction and it's very serious.
"If someone does collapse and you've got to do CPR, we teach hands-only CPR. ... Adequate compressions is really what the focus is on -- 100 to 120 beats a minute, or compressions per minute is what you want. There are a lot of songs that they teach that you can use, but 'Staying Alive' is the popular one. ... But anything to 100 and 120 beats per minute would be adequate. You don't have to provide mouth-to-mouth breathing," Smith said.
Even if you are providing CPR, you still need to call 911. They can help you keep count.
If other people are around, it's good to delegate tasks like calling 911.
"If you instruct one person to do it, that helps the delegation tasks ... making sure we're not bombarding their lines and making sure it's getting done. They can count with you on the phone if you're needing something to keep you on task, or a sound or a beat," Smith said.
Knowing where the Automatic External Defibrillators are is also important.
"Studies show that only 50% of people are aware of where their AED is located or how to use it. That's 50% more people that you could be helping if that situation were to happen. AEDs are very simple to use.
"We provide a little bit of training on that when we teach hands-only CPR as well," Smith said.
She added that you can double or triple the survival rate of cardiac arrest victims if you provide early CPR and AED use.
Only 10% of people who have a cardiac arrest outside the hospital will survive.
Each year, 420,000 Americans experience sudden cardiac arrest outside a hospital.
"Every 90 seconds somebody is having a cardiac arrest; every 40 seconds somebody's having a heart attack," Smith said.