There really are four things
every american should do.
One does not smoke. One is get
their body mass index down to around 25.
Now, didn't have to be 25,
it could be 27, 27.5. If you don't know what
body mass index is go on
Google and search it and
it'll give you a formula.
Put in your height and weight and
it'll tell you what it is.
One is eating at least five
fruits and vegetables a day.
And that is really important.
And the last is trying to
exercise at least a 150 minutes a week.
And that's a vigorous exercise,
walking fast, Something like that.
If you can do those four things,
it's been shown to lower your risk of
dying, having a heart attack,
having a stroke--by 40% in just four years.
Now you may say it's not much,
but let's compare that to something else.
Let's compare that to stents.
Stents
don't lower your chance of that at all.
Those things at all.
In a stable, chronically Stable Patient,
bypass, it's about half that
good even if you have
a lot of narrowing of your arteries.
What about the drugs?
We take Liptore, Zocor
that's maybe a third or a quarter is good.
So the lifestyle things
are incredibly important.
And only 3% of
Americans do these four things.
And that's the sad part because these are
not things that are toxic.
He's not things are going
to hurt your liver or not.
Things are going to cost you a lot of money.
In fact, they'll probably save you money.
Yeah, it's a couple of groups.
One is somewhat the family history.
You know, I think we're
all paying more attention at
a family history and that people
knew that their father had
a heart attack at age 48 and they're
now 46 and they want
to start to get concerned about it.
It is people that have had
problems that we are seeing earlier and earlier.
Patients present
with heart attacks and strokes.
We've got a patient in the hospital
service now that's age 21,
that's too young and
they're starting to say, gee,
it may not have been in their family,
but may have been a co-worker,
somebody like that and says,
gosh, Fred or Mary
had this thing, am I at risk?
And they're coming in for that.
In the third group is people were
seeing that have known disease,
doing everything they can in terms
of getting bypass, getting medicines.
But they're still having trouble.
And they're coming in saying,
What else do I need to do?
It's kinda funny because now we're kind of
going back to what's the basics and say,
what do you, what are
the basic things you need to do?
Exercise, eat right?
All the things your mother told you that we
never really had quantified
in some of these studies really
are just in the last year and a half
that has shown us how effective
--in fact, this one study
of the four things was
a 16 thousand patient study.
They brought
16 thousand patients in and said,
do these four things: eat right,
don't smoke, exercise, and lose weight.
And that just came out the last a year and
a half. When I was an interventionist,
patients would come in
with an acute heart attack.
They'd be in asystole,
their heart wouldn't beat.
They had a total occlusion of
their front left artery and
their mortality could be as high as 25-30%.
But with intervention a stent, a balloon,
you can have a 92% chance
of treating them getting out of
the hospital 4-5 days later,
walking on vertical. Success.
So that was a pretty good success rate.
Very satisfying.
Prevention is a little different.
People come in, they're not eating right?
They're not exercising, they're stressed,
they're not taking care of themselves.
The national average to get
someone to change is about 2%.
We have a 98% failure rate and
there really is not much
research in that area
other than giving statins and some of those drugs.
So we're trying to do research that says,
what are the things we
really need to do to help
you by getting back to the basics.
Because finding, especially
this arc study has shown us,
is so important just to get
back to the basics and
take care yourself.
We are investigating a couple of things.
One is these agents that,
that lower cholesterol like
statins and sterols combined with fish oil,
which we know can lower
your chance of sudden cardiac death.
Fish oil is the only food ever
endorsed by the American Heart Association.
It's only pill I take every day because
about 1000 milligrams, DHA and EPA,
the two active ingredients
that's on the side of the bottle and
fish oil will lower
your chance of dying suddenly significantly.
And it's a pretty low-risk thing.
We're studying that we're
studying what types of
things may lead patients
to change their behavior.
Yeah, we all tell patients
things and that's educating them,
but we're not changing their behavior,
which is whole different kettle of fish.
And that takes a lot of
research to look into that.
We're looking into your own body's
stem cell response.
We know that people that have
a heart attack and start exercising
after a heart attack have more stem cells,
the cells that are the progenitors
that can go to your heart and help
grow new muscle. That
the ones that are active and do
exercise after heart attacks have a lot
more of those cells than ones that aren't.
So again, it's looking into the things you can do
is a patient to really
help yourself the most.