Firefighters join fight against heart disease

I attended a seminar several years ago led by the enigmatic then-fire chief of Phoenix, Ariz., Alan Brunacini, who made one of the keenest observations about emergency responders I’d ever heard.

He said, “One of the toughest things to do is put a firefighter in reverse.”

Chief Brunacini used this universal truth to illustrate several points about firefighter behavior, which all boiled down to one thing: Once a firefighter sets his or her mind to a task, it’s nearly impossible to persuade them otherwise.

Bull-headed is not the word I’d use; mission-oriented is.

Why else would a sane, rational person place their personal safety at risk for the benefit of someone they probably don’t even know?

I say this to illustrate a point of my own: Firefighters, EMTs and paramedics are champs at improving the health and welfare of others, so much so sometimes they forget to pay attention to their own health and welfare. Here’s an example:

Cardiovascular emergencies regularly top the list of reasons people call an ambulance. These events often take the form of chest pain, difficulty breathing, heart attack, stroke, sudden cardiac arrest, mini-stroke and other conditions with similar signs and symptoms.

These calls for EMS are so common emergency responders are extremely well-versed not only in their treatment, but also the risk factors that contribute to them.

It’s surprising, then, that by far the No. 1 contributor to firefighter line-of-duty deaths is — you guessed it — cardiovascular emergencies.

Newton firefighters have joined emergency responders around the nation in an effort to drastically reduce the number of duty-related deaths by embracing a peer-based fitness initiative designed to enhance their response readiness and overall health.

Select department members recently completed an intensive train-the-trainer certification course in which they learned to design, introduce, coach and evaluate personalized fitness regimens for their fellow firefighters.

An important component of this program is a review of coronary heart disease risk factors, which fall into two categories: those we can change and those we can’t.

Happily, there are only three risk factors over which we have no control: increasing age, our gender and heredity.

More than 83 percent of people who die of coronary heart disease are 65 or older, and most are men.

While I consider myself fairly young, I have begun to notice the increasing regularity with which we encounter people in their 30s and 40s presenting with life-threatening cardiovascular conditions.

Children of parents with heart disease are more likely to develop it themselves, and one’s ethnicity plays a significant role as well: African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, American Indians, native Hawaiians and Asian-Americans have a greater chance of developing coronary heart disease than Caucasians.

While there are several risk factors one can modify, most people don’t consider them easy areas to address.

For instance, smokers of tobacco are two to four times as likely to develop coronary heart disease as nonsmokers, and cigarette smoking in particular acts with other risk factors to greatly increase the risk for the disease.

Here are some other modifiable coronary heart disease risk factors:

• High blood cholesterol

• High blood pressure

• Physical inactivity

• Obesity and overweight

• Diabetes mellitus

While each of these risk factors contributes to the disease, each one can be addressed through diet, exercise, medication or a combination of all three.

Other risk factors include high levels of stress and drinking too much alcohol.

Coronary heart disease is a problem of startling proportions: an estimated 1.2 million people will have a heart attack this year and about 452,000 of them will die.

With a little luck, a lot of hard work and the firefighter’s traditional mission-oriented attitude, perhaps we can put this trend in reverse.

To learn more about coronary heart disease, visit www.americanheart.org.

Scott Metzler is a batallion chief with the Newton Fire/EMS Department.Contact him at scottmetzler@newtonfireems.com.