Dr Kerryn Phelps, Health Editor, with Steve Leibmann, Channel Nine, 'Today'

PHELPS: Good morning, Steve.

LEIBMANN: Pleasant respite?

PHELPS: Yes. Well, this week has been has very good for everyone's blood pressure.

LEIBMANN: It has… I'll have to get it checked when I go back to the surgery.

LEIBMANN: I've been looking at some of the figures. Cardiovascular disease remains the major public health problem for Australia. One Australian dies every ten minutes from it. What more can doctors do, to alert the community to the problems of heart disease, and how to avoid them?

PHELPS: Well, I think the National Heart Foundation and the medical profession have said just about everything they can say…

LEIBMANN: You must be talked out.

PHELPS: We are but you won't believe how hard it is to get people to stop smoking, and it's in fact very difficult with an addiction like cigarette smoking to get people to understand that that is going to have an impact on the long-term. Maybe not tomorrow or next week, but certainly in the long-term, and it's a real worry that a third of 17 year olds are smoking regularly, now they are the people who are going to be looking at cardiovascular disease down the track. And, one very sobering statistic is that if you're 40 years old now, if you're a male, you've got one in two chance of cardiovascular disease down the track; if you're a woman it's a one in three chance, so that's pretty nasty odds.

LEIBMANN: So, how do you reinforce the message?

PHELPS: Well, we do what we can to get individuals to take responsibility for their own health.

LEIBMANN: For themselves.

PHELPS: And they have to adopt that risk. And, the point is that there are ways of modifying your risk. You can exercise regularly, you can adopt a low fat diet, learn to manage stress in a positive and effective way, of course, don't smoke, that's a big one. And, they sound so simple, report any symptoms to your doctor, have your blood pressure checked, that's very important, knowing what your blood pressure is, and if you have had cardiovascular disease talk to your doctor about whether you should be taking regular aspirin.

LEIBMANN: Yeah.

PHELPS: But, these things are very important. What it means is that people have to go to their doctors for checkups to know what their blood pressure is, to have their cholesterol level checked…

LEIBMANN: How often? Once a year, once you get to 40+?

PHELPS: I think once you're 40, annual check ups are very important. For people who have high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease it might need to be a little more frequently than then, but depending on what your doctors advises. But, there are things you can do yourself, and just walking for half an hour a few times a week, preferably everyday, but if you could have some form of exercise, like walking, just half an hour, three or four times a week, that will go a long way to helping your heart health. Giving up smoking, and making sure that your diet is low in fat, and a lot of people say, 'Oh, well I have a low fat diet', and you say 'Do you eat ice cream?', 'Oh, just once a day', 'Do you eat cakes?', 'Oh yeah, maybe just once a day', and you say, 'Well, if you can cut back on that, you're cutting back on the amount of fat in your diet', and of course, the big one is cigarette smoking, is that there are ways of getting over that. There are nicotine replacement therapies that are very readily available. You can talk to your pharmacists, you can talk to your doctor about strategies, you can talk to a pshycologists about ways of avoiding smoking, so, there are ways of giving that up.

LEIBMANN: Because, the other one you didn't mention, is managing stress. And, it seems to me that in the environment in which we all live and work these days, stress is becoming a bigger and bigger factor, and it can be managed.

PHELPS: It is. I mean a lot of people work under pressure, but if they are not coping with that pressure it becomes stress, and there are ways of dealing with that. And, quiet often what you have to do is to prioritise stress management in to your life. So, to look at whether you spend any time in leisure activities, if you're giving enough time to family, if your delegating things that you don't really need to do, and a lot of people would do well to cull some of the useless activities out of their lives, and look at really managing their stress in an effective way. Now, this might mean reading, listening to music, going to a yoga class, taking up tai chi, seeing a psychologist to talk about counselling, seeing their general practitioner to talk about problems that they might be having in their lives, looking at the barriers to effective prevention of heart disease, and looking at ways over those barriers. And, what it takes is individual motivation, and I hope that that motivation isn't that person's stroke, or first heart attack because, quite often that is what it takes to get people to change their habits, is that their best friend has a heart attack, or a stroke.

LEIBMANN: Yeah.

PHELPS: And, you know, it's never too late to change your habits, and I think that's the message to take home, here.

LEIBMANN: Well, that's the headline for the day. Good to see you.

Ends