Made-in-Edmonton solution credited for saving lives from heart attacks

An Alberta man who recently survived a heart attack credits the people who created a special pill holder that helped slow down symptoms with saving his life.

It’s been eight months since David McKay had a heart attack.

A life-altering incident the Hinton man says would’ve killed him if not for pills in a case developed at the University of Alberta and manufactured in Edmonton that he received from a southside auto dealership three years ago.

McKay, a 45-year-old train engineer, suffered a heart attack when he got into bed the night of July 21. He remembers suffering from what felt like heartburn then a pulsating pain that went from one of his armpits to his neck.

He took antacids, but they didn’t work, and he still “felt weird, like it just didn’t seem right.”

McKay ended up taking some pills from a case he had received from Wheaton Honda. Inside the SMHeartCard: four aspirin on one side to prevent a blood clot, three nitroglycerin pills on the other to expand blood vessels to increase blood flow.

He wound up collapsing, sapped of all his strength, but was on the floor for just a minute, McKay recounts.

“My legs had given out, but I honestly believe that those pills, if I hadn’t taken them, I don’t think I’d be here or I would have had to have a triple bypass,” he told CTV News Edmonton.

And on Wednesday for the first time, McKay met some of the people behind the SMHeartCard, including James Stewart, who created it with the help of several researchers and doctors at the Edmonton university.

Stewart brought the idea to the U of A after starting to work on developing the case in 2018. He runs remote bush camps in the Rockies and, as part of being prepared for emergencies, keeps full first-aid kits on hand. He was finding keeping nitroglycerin pills stable a challenge. The quest: coming up with material that didn’t react with nitroglycerin, which is unstable and reacts to air, light and materials such as plastics and metals, losing its potency.

The result was the creation of a special polymer blend.

Stewart, the chief executive officer of SMHeartCard, says it’s the first such container made anywhere.

“The nitroglycerin pills hold their potency in the card,” he said. “I’m proud to say this is the first of its kind in the world.”

The pill case is refillable via SMHeartCard’s website or a pharmacy. It also comes with a mobile phone sleeve.

“We wanted to make sure that it was portable and accessible when some of the other products aren’t and people aren’t carrying them around and they’re cumbersome to carry,” said Neal Davies, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the U of A who helped develop it.

Stewart says his office has taken more than 200 calls from people who credit the SMHeartCard for saving their lives.

“I always ask people, ‘Can first responders get to wherever you are within 10 minutes?’” he said. “If the answer is ‘no,’ carry aspirin and carry nitroglycerin to save yourself.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Nahreman Issa