Category: Cardiology 101

posts here focus on a variety of topics all about the heart and how it works

Why heart patients generally don’t say: “Doc, tell me what to do and I’ll do it!”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 9 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas     ♥    @HeartSisters 

When you need medical help, how does your family doctor decide which diagnostic tests to order for you, and which treatments to recommend based on those test results?  Physicians are trained to rely on a type of professional playbook called clinical guidelines to help them make those decisions. But as Dr. Michael Vallis, a professor of family medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, described the problem family docs face with clinical guidelines:

“There’s just no way they can follow every single guideline. One of the biggest impediments to physicians following new guideline recommendations is that they’re overwhelmed.”       .
 Continue reading “Why heart patients generally don’t say: “Doc, tell me what to do and I’ll do it!”” →

Family history of unusually early heart attack? You may carry this gene

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 19 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas     ♥    @HeartSisters 

.            Katherine Wilemon*

“After the shock of having a heart attack at age 39, I was a new mom at home with an infant, trying to make sense of being both a new parent and a heart disease patient”.    Katherine Wilemon had known since age 15 that she had high LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, but years later was diagnosed with a cholesterol disorder called familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), and then with elevated levels of another fatty particle in the blood called lipoprotein(a) – Said out loud, this is called “LP-little-(a).

One in five people worldwide have the same cardiac risk factor that Katherine had.  Dr. Henry Ginsberg at Columbia University, a leading expert on lipoprotein(a), explained in the New York Times: (“A Heart Risk Factor Even Doctors Don’t Know About”):

“People don’t know about it, physicians don’t know about it.”     . 
Continue reading “Family history of unusually early heart attack? You may carry this gene” →

Heart Month awareness: doing the same thing, yet expecting different results

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 33 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥   @HeartSisters

February is our shortest month of the year and also the month officially acknowledged almost everywhere as Heart Health Awareness Month. Then we all turn the calendar page and glide over to March, the official month of Liver Health Awareness, Disability Awareness, Ovarian Cancer Awareness, Red Cross Awareness worldwide – and many other causes. My niggling question remains: do these assorted official days/weeks/months of awareness-raising actually help to raise awareness out there?  Continue reading “Heart Month awareness: doing the same thing, yet expecting different results” →

Dear Carolyn: “After 19 months of daily discomfort, my pacemaker was replaced”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 11 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥  @HeartSisters

             .     Clayton & Linda Vardy

As part of our occasional “Dear Carolyn” series of personal patient perspectives shared by my readers, today I’m introducing you to Canadian heart patient, Linda Vardy, a retired high school math teacher. You might expect that Linda’s experience of undergoing triple bypass surgery at age 61 (after being told for almost a year that all of her cardiac test results were “inconclusive”) would be a dominant theme in her story – but that part is for a future post.

Ten years after her surgery, Linda was told that she now needed a pacemaker implanted. And that’s when things started going sideways. While I was reading her story, I couldn’t help wondering if Linda might have been treated differently had she been a male heart patient.  Read her story and let me know what you think. . .       . Continue reading “Dear Carolyn: “After 19 months of daily discomfort, my pacemaker was replaced”” →