AUGUST 2017AWW.COM.AU 97
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[ Health investigation]
Forget the middle-aged, overweight male cardiac
statistic–anewmysteryheartcondition affecting
young fit women strikes suddenly and often with
deadly consequences.Beverley Hadgraftmeets three
women on a mission to find the cause and a cure.
Liza Stearn,
Age 44
Three years ago, Liza Stearn was a
super-fit young mum. She ran, swam,
kayaked and played competitive touch
footie. She’d race after her children,
Ella and Lochie, then aged seven and
three – jumping on trampolines or
hiking into the bush to go camping.
Then she went to a house inspection
and everything changed. “I think I’m
going to faint,” she told her husband,
Lawrence, who helped her lie down.
“I’m so sorry, we’ll just go home,”
she told the worried estate agent as
he took her pulse and said it was
disturbingly erratic. But Lawrence was
already calling an ambulance.
“It was lucky he did,” Liza says
today. Within two minutes of its
arrival, she was in cardiac arrest.
“My heart, literally, stopped.”
The paramedics frantically carried
out CPR for more than 30 minutes,
Liza’s ribs cracking under the pressure.
She was shocked repeatedly with a
defibrillator until on the seventh
attempt, her heart finally startedbeating again and she was raced to
Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital, body
blue and eyes bulging.
Doctors discovered a branch of
Liza’s left coronary artery had torn
from top to bottom–aSCAD
(spontaneous coronary artery
dissection), an event that, bafflingly,
mainly affects fit young women. She
spent six weeks in hospital, including
a week in intensive care, during which
time she also suffered a heart attack.
When she returned to her home in
Rose Bay in Sydney, in November
2014, she says: “I felt as if I’d aged
40 years.” It’s taken a positive attitude,
an internal cardiac defibrillator, beta
blockers and blood thinners, plus
a determination to be there for her
children, to keep her going. But,
she adds: “With no cure, no cause
and no management plan, you’re just
winging it each day. I do feel ripped off.”
Liza was 41. She was the last
person anyone expected to suffer heart
failure. But that’s what everyone says
when SCADs happen. In every case, the
women – usually aged 30 to 50 – are
going about their daily business.»The mystery
illness
killing Aussie
women