Doctor Warrick
Health experts have banded together to tackle a condition that's linked to almost one in four deaths. It's Australia’s first Cholesterol Awareness Week, with high cholesterol affecting more than 2 million Aussies. Author and Cardiologist, Doctor Warrick Bishop joins @mikeamor7
See More: https://x.com/7NewsMelbourne/status/1855844551581467050
How Healthy is Your Heart, Really?... https://virtualheartcheck.com.au
TRANSCRIPT:
Health experts have banded together to tackle a condition that's linked to almost one in four deaths.
It's Australia's first cholesterol awareness week with high cholesterol affecting more than 2 million.Aussies.
We're joined by Dr. Warwick Bishop, author and cardiologists.
Were speaking in the break of very passionate about this.
Warwick, why have you gotten behind the Cholesterol Awareness Week?
Uh, look, thanks for the introduction, Mike.
Essentially, uh, we can treat cholesterol if we know who's at high risk.
If we know cholesterol's elevated, we can actually start therapy way before there's a problem.
And believe it or not, we can stop people having heart attacks.
I have two skill sets.
I can fix people up if they've had a heart attack or I can prevent people having a heart attack in the first place.
And most people think using that, preventing skillset is the one they prefer me to use.
And, uh, personally that's what I prefer to do as well.
Yeah, I'd rather you prevent it than have to fix it.
For sure.
We all heard about the Shane Warn effect for people going out and getting tests after the cricketers, untimely death.
I was one of those.
I went and got a calcium score.
It was easy.
What sort of people have high cholesterol?
'cause sometimes it, it can be misleading.
Can it, it's not necessarily, um, people who are unfit or over 50, for example.
Yeah, exactly right Mike.
It is more complicated than, oh, I eat well or exercise or my cholesterol's not too bad or my family history's.
Okay.
I think it's really important for people to understand that cholesterol's a little bit like sea air and the rust in your pipes is a little bit like your car rusting.
If you park your car down, down by the sea, the longer that car is near that salt air and exposed to that, the nearer it is to those high levels of salt, the greater the risk of rust.
Same with cholesterol, Mike.
The longer you've got raised cholesterol, the higher that cholesterol, the greater the chance of getting rust in your pipes.
So as we age, we all should re should really be thinking about getting a check.
And when we realize that one in four people are impacted by heart disease, one in four, then just about everyone should get checked.
I, I can't see a reason why we shouldn't all, um, have our cholesterol checked and if appropriate, get further testing done.
A bit like you alluded to the calcium score you had done.
So doctor, how preventable is a heart attack once you start getting treatment for high cholesterol?
Is it too late then?
Look, it depends how early we catch it.
At the end of the day, Mike, what we're trying to do is stop people having unexpected out of the blue heart attacks.
'cause it's those events that can lead to people literally dropping dead unexpectedly when they're out doing something else completely unheralded.
And honestly, you don't get another go there.
But if we can identify high risk people, and you mentioned Shane Warren, an absolute tragedy, but if we, if we could turn the clock back, if we could have imaged his arteries at 50 years of age, we would've been forewarned for prepared.
We could have put him on therapies that would've had an extremely good chance of altering his future.
And he may still have had issues with his arteries.
He may still have needed some sort of therapies, but we would've markedly reduced that risk of a heart attack out of the blue because that's linked to sudden cardiac death.
I really believe we could eradicate heart attack if we got this right, Mike.
Uh, let's hope we can one day do just that.
Dr. Warwick Bishop, thank you very much.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you.
.
