Straight from the heart
When cardiologist Dr Arintaya Phrommintikul is not teaching or tending to patients, she's busy looking for more ways to save lives
There’s an air of satisfaction in the quiet laboratory at Chiang Mai University’s Faculty of Medicine, where cardiologist Dr Arintaya Phrommintikul spends much of her time doing a great deal of life-saving but largely unnoticed clinical research. It was here that she discovered that the influenza vaccine could perhaps reduce the risks faced by patients with acute coronary disease.
Dr Arintaya’s work has already caught international attention, with the European Heart Journal publishing her findings early last year and the Reuters news agency writing a health report based on it.
“I am going to present this research at the upcoming ESC Congress 2012 in Munich,” Arintaya said.
The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) holds a conference on the science, management and prevention of cardiovascular diseases every year, and this year’s congress is scheduled to run from August 25 to August 29 in Munich, Germany.
Born in 1971, Arintaya graduated from the Faculty of Medicine, Prince of Songkla University with first-class honours in 1993. However, she has never stopped studying internal medicine and cardiology.
In 2000, she won the Thai Heart Association Award for a cardiology fellowship research proposal. In 2002, top scores in the Cardiology Board examination won her a Thai Heart Association Scholarship, and two years later, she was granted the Thai Heart Association Young Investigator Award.
This bright specialist could be earning a six-figure salary had she opted for private practice.
“My colleagues and I never talk about expensive houses or luxury cars. We talk about patients,” she said. Her day begins early at the medical faculty, where she not only teaches her students but also treats heart patients.
After work, she gets busy with research in the hope to ease the suffering of heart patients.
“I enjoy working and hope I can be a role model for my students,” she said, adding that as a student she always looked up to one of her lecturers Prof Dr Tada Yipintsoi. “He’s my role model. He was devoted to his patients and his students.”
Tada, a former dean of the Prince of Songkla University’s Faculty of Medicine, was widely respected as a doctor and researcher. Though he passed away early last year, he is still fondly remembered.
Arintaya explained that Tada inspired one of her long-term projects – gathering information on high-risk heart patients for a multi-centre study known as CORE Thailand.
The project gets Bt400,000 every month from the Thai Heart Association and the Clinical Research Collaboration Network (CRCN). The total budget for the project is estimated at between B13 million and Bt15 million. Its objectives are to determine the rate of heart/cardiovascular diseases among high-risk groups, identify the risk factors, develop a risk scores system, assess the treatment given to high-risk patients and check the control of risk factors.
“We will cover 10,000 patients,” Arintaya says. “Tada once told me that we should conduct research that can gather different levels of information. This data can be a valuable national asset.”
Researchers working on this project will collect samples from hospitals across the country, and also seek advice from other medical specialists including diabetes and osteology experts.
“If we know the risk factors, we should be able to better prevent the incidence of heart disease. At present, most cases being tended to by cardiologists are already serious,” she said.
She went on to say that “research is like religion, it sets out to explore how to end suffering”.
Arintaya said she is very proud of her 2007 study on mortality and haemoglobin concentrations in anaemic patients with chronic kidney disease treated with erythropoietin.
The research found higher haemoglobin concentrations in patients with chronic kidney disease resulting from the administration of recombinant human erythropoietin leading to a higher risk of death, with the result that doctors across the world became extra careful with erythropoietin treatment. Today, they no longer allow haemoglobin to climb too high.
Arintaya’s happiness is not just limited to her research. She is also dedicated to helping patients, many of whom travel to her surgery at the faculty from remote villages. Many of her well-to-do patients have also pitched in to help her support the less fortunate.
“Although the hilltribe Thais can get free treatment, they face greater difficulties and travelling to the hospital can be expensive. It’s really difficult for them to manage with the limited amount of medicines prescribed per visit,” Arintaya said. “When I raised this point with some well-to-do patients, they offered to help. They have donated money to buy additional medicines to ensure that the hilltribe patients can avoid extra problems”.
Just like her mentor Tada, Arintaya remains a source of inspiration in her own right.
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