It's time to fight heart disease and other silent illnesses with the same urgency we use for cancer. Discover how a proactive approach, using early detection and advanced screening, can help you prevent a crisis before it begins.
When I wrote the book Fight Heart Disease Like Cancer last year, a major goal of mine was to empower everyone with the knowledge to be proactive in preventing disease so they can live long, healthy lives with friends and family. Learning from how we approach cancer, I highlighted that early detection is a key element to prevent heart attacks and more, including stroke, hypertension, diabetes, kidney disease, and dementia.
Just like most cancers, these diseases are typically “silent” for a long time, meaning you won’t feel symptoms, often until it is too late. The good news is we now have much better tests and tools to detect the earliest indicators of disease, when it’s most reversible.
For far too long, we’ve relied on a health system of sporadic, reactive care, waiting until symptoms develop instead of pursuing continuous, proactive care. This is why many people don’t know they have major health conditions like hypertension, diabetes, and kidney disease until they have severe, irreversible disease. Often, the clues are already inside the electronic health record, but no one is sifting through all the data to connect the dots for you.
I’ve helped develop consumer-friendly health devices with companies like Google and Apple, but many people don't know how to turn on key features or connect the data to their healthcare provider. This leaves us with a wealth of information about our own bodies that we're not using effectively. We need a better way.
A major opportunity I discuss in my book is leveraging the latest technology to catch diseases like heart disease early. This modern, proactive approach combines the latest science and guidelines with new tools to create a personalized health plan.
In my preventive cardiology clinic at Stanford, we start by calculating a heart disease risk score and asking about other personal health factors that may increase risk, from ethnicity to autoimmune diseases to genetics. But the standard risk score calculation isn’t simple, and the list of risk-enhancing factors is long (more than 10 items). It’s no wonder that most people don’t even know their risk score, let alone the full picture of their heart disease risk.
Following the guidelines of the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology, your risk score and other factors tell us when it's time to get an imaging test to diagnose early heart disease. The key imaging test advocated in the guidelines, the coronary artery calcium (CAC) scan, takes only 5 minutes, is low-cost, and can detect the “plaque” growths in our heart arteries long before they become “malignant” and cause heart attacks. And if treated early, these plaque growths can be reversed and made “benign” - basically curing the most common type of heart disease!
It may surprise you to know that if you’re a 45-year-old man or a 55-year-old woman, you have a 1 in 4 chance of already having plaque growths in your heart arteries, based on a large, multi-ethnic study in the U.S. And if you have risk factors, CAC scans can turn positive for men in their 30s and women in their 40s. Yet even many people have not heard of CAC scans, despite heart disease being the #1 cause of death. Importantly, if you’ve had a retinal image, mammogram, or CT scan for other reasons, these images also contain information on the health of your blood vessels that AI can detect. And it’s the health of our blood vessels that determines the health of our heart, brain, and kidneys.
Preventing and reversing heart disease is only one example of using the latest technology and science to stay healthy. High blood pressure, diabetes, and kidney disease can also be reversed, but only if detected early. And most Americans, when checked, will actually have indicators of adverse cardiovascular or metabolic health. So how do you stay ahead of the curve? The vision is to use the most recent capabilities of AI to allow everyone to have a personalized prevention specialist on their phone. By analyzing your health data on a regular basis, including your unique risk factors and individual risk scores, you’d get a “check engine” notice right away when it’s time to look under the hood for early heart disease.
We all deserve this modern approach to healthcare - to keep our body and critical organs healthy by combining the latest technologies and science to personalize prevention, screening, and treatment. The first step on this journey is often the simplest: know your numbers, get your risk assessment, and gain the knowledge to stay healthy.
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