OFFICIALS from Rwanda Heart Foundation (RHF) and the Ministry of Health are holding several discussions to see how a study on cardiovascular heart diseases can be conducted.

According to Dr. Joseph Mucumbitsi, the chairman of the RHF, there are risk factors of cardiovascular diseases evident in the country which should be prevented.

"We don’t have a national heart diseases study. So we don’t know the country’s heart diseases status. The first year when we had an open free check up, 960 were diagnosed with heart diseases, 7% had hypertension and 12 of the women were diagnosed with obesity. It is evident that we don’t have to sit back, it might not be too much but we need to be awake and begin preventive measures,” Dr. Mucumbitsi said.

"Development of any country comes with change in eating habits, increased negligence of sports exercises which puts some to the risk of obesity. It can also develop coronary heart diseases causing high cholesterol oils stiffing in coronary arteries that supply blood to the hear,t hence resulting into heart attack,” he said.

"Reports have indicated that in more developed African countries like Nigeria, young people in their 40s die due to coronary diseases. When they begin exercises abruptly, the blood circulation into their heart fails due to stiff coronary arteries leading to sudden death.”

Mucumbitsi also said that most developing countries including Rwanda have been directing resources to communicable diseases like HIV/Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis other than non-communicable diseases.

"I believe this is the time that we should begin to pull resources to non communicable diseases like heart diseases since we are developing and getting closer to high risk of cardiovascular diseases,” Mucumbitsi said.

He also said that unfortunately, RHF lacks funding and works with no budget to fight heart diseases noting that Rheumatic heart diseases which can be prevented 100% may end up killing many.

Mucumbitsi said that among 181 heart disease patients registered in four years, 21% have rheumatic heart diseases while 2.5 million heart patients between 5 and 16 years of age have been diagnosed in Sub-Saharan Africa and 300, 000 deaths have been recorded per year.

An estimation of 17.2million people die per year across the world due to cardiovascular heart diseases and the biggest percentage die in developing countries.

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