A UCT professor has established that African women seem to be most at risk of developing a fatal heart condition during pregnancy or after the delivery of their babies.
Karen Sliwa-Hahnle is the new professor of cardiology at UCT’s Hatter Institute.
She has been doing research on heart disease for 10 years, specifically looking at a condition called peripartum cardiomyopathy, which is more common in Africa than other parts of the world.
Sliwa-Hahnle said: “These are healthy women; they have a child, go home, and they develop this disease.”
The condition kills about 20 percent affected and is a rare disorder diagnosed in women in the final month of pregnancy or within five months of delivery.
Sliwa-Hahnle said chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer are fast becoming the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. More worrying is that 80 percent of deaths from chronic disease occurs in low- and middle-income countries.
There are various reasons for this, including obesity, which leads to high blood pressure. The heart rate usually picks up during pregnancy.
Sliwa-Hahnle collected vital statistics during the groundbreaking Heart of Soweto study that she established and led at Wits University, which looked at the emerging causes and consequences of cardiovascular disease in South Africa.
In that study, she and colleagues screened over 8 000 people between 2006 and 2008, and started a primary care registry of 1 300 patients at risk of cardiovascular disease – particularly because of high blood pressure.
Sliwa-Hahnle said preventing the escalation of this problem was a challenge. It also highlighted the burden of chronic disease, brought on by obesity and high blood pressure in South Africa.
One of the interventions has been a study now managed from the Hatter Institute. “We now have a dedicated clinic on Thursdays for pregnant women who suffer from cardiac disease or heart problems.”
She said acute rheumatic heart disease was also a major health problem, especially when it went undetected.
She has given five lectures in the US and Europe on peripartum cardiomyopathy, and she currently leads a working group on the condition for the European Society of Cardiology.
In a recent article in UCT’s Monday Paper, it was said she had already earned herself two nicknames at the Hatter Institute: one was Lindiwe (Xhosa for “the one we have been waiting for”, often given to foreigners; Sliwa-Hahnle is from Germany), and the other, overheard at UCT by Sliwa-Hahnle herself, was Hurricane Katrina. - Weekend Argus