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Cocaine at the heart of cardiac complications
[mis à jour le 11 May 2007 à 09h52]
Increasingly widespread, the use of cocaine is worrying healthcare professionals. They are now talking about it in terms of an “epidemic.” In The Lancet, Italian doctors recount the case of a man of 31 admitted to A&E with heart failure. The risk factor? His cocaine abuse.
Hypertrophy of the left ventricle, bradycardia – an abnormally slow heart rate – and general fatigue. This was how this young patient, only 31 years old and with no medical antecedents, presented on arrival at A&E in Siena General Hospital.
“We discovered that the patient’s left ventricle was dilated to 80 mm”, explain Dr Valerio Zacà and his colleagues. And this was due to obvious cocaine abuse. This drug is having devastating effects among young people both in the United States and in Europe. As it becomes increasingly cheap to buy, it is flooding western markets and bringing with it a host of cardiac complications. To the extent that Dr Zacà now advises fellow doctors “systematically to ask whether there is ‘a history of cocaine consumption’ in the case of (unusually) young patients suffering from heart failure”.
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