PRINCETON, W.Va. -The American Heart Association in 2004 began its Wear Red Campaign to bring awareness and education to the importance of your heart health.
According to the World Health Organization 32% of deaths were related to cardiovascular diseases.
At WVU Medicine Princeton Community Hospital, they’re recognizing the need to spread knowledge about heart disease symptoms and risk factors that you can lower.
“So, chest pain or shortness of breath with exertion are the most classic symptoms of cardiac disease. So, chest pain with exertion, it resolves when you sit down and rest. Um, or maybe it gets better when you place nitroglycerin under your tongue. Those are the classic symptoms of angina,” said Dr. Stephen Ward Director of Interventional Cardiology and Director of Cardiology for WVU Medicine Princeton Community Hospital.
Some risk factors that can be reduced are smoking, obesity, diabetes, and not being active but if you are experiencing increased symptoms or more severity of symptoms action needs to be taken.
“You know, if there are any signs and symptoms of heart attack, you need to get to the emergency room. We’re here at WVU Medicine PCH to take care of people. We want to be able to make sure that people know in our area we can meet their needs. We’ve seen our volume go up year over year because people are more aware that, you know, we do cardiac intervention stints, time us heart. So this is just a day set aside to think about heart disease and hopefully inspire others to see their primary care provider and make sure that they’re identifying risk factors and getting the blood work and the different types of screening that can really help them know what they need to do individually to reduce the risk,” said Karen Bowling, President CEO of WVU Medicine Princeton Community Hospital.
Those at the hospital are always evaluating and processing what they can do to provide the best care for the community because of the need for treatment of heart disease. With new equipment and resources some individuals can get a CT scan of their heart.
“It’s a very good test at determining the presence of coronary disease and if there’s high risk coronary disease, and then, it helps us risk stratify people into who may need to have a heart catheterization, who may need to have more intensive medical therapy to prevent problems down the line, or who doesn’t really need to worry about it right now, just needs to worry about modifying their modifiable risk factors,” continued Dr. Ward.
Copyright 2025 WVVA. All rights reserved.