UK doctors say they are totally baffled by a massive rise in potentially fatal heart attacks.
Doctors in the West of Scotland say there was a 25 per cent rise in people who needed to be brought into the emergency room of Golden Jubilee National Hospital in Clydebank with partially blocked arteries, which restricted blood to the heart.
According to The Times, Golden Jubilee National Hospital is the largest centre in the UK and usually handles 240 patients a month suffering from this type of heart attack, but that now well over 300 are being admitted each month.
Specifically, doctors are investigating N-STEMI attacks (non-ST segment elevation myocardial infarction), which causes more minor damage than STEMI attacks but has an equal likelihood of proving fatal.
Doctors say they have investigated whether COVID-19 is the cause but have found no apparent pattern.
They do not say whether they have looked into COVID vaccination, which is well known to cause heart conditions such as myocarditis.
“There is not any evidence that it is as a consequence of any delayed care or missed opportunity,” said lead consultant cardiologist Mitchell Lindsay. “It is likely to be due to a multitude of factors: people being sedentary with lockdown; stress; people ignoring symptoms because they do not want to present at [the] hospital. There are probably five to ten causes, all linked.”
In response to this enormous increase in heart attack patients, the Golden Jubilee has increased its cardiology beds from 29 to 42 in a desperate attempt to keep up with rising cases of myocardial infarction.
Doctors do not know if there will be any relief in sight and have decided to keep patients in the Golden Jubilee to fully recover rather than risk sending them to likewise overburdened local hospitals, which cannot handle the additional stress another influx of patients would bring.