High Schoolers are Screened for Heart Health

Cardiologist, Joseph Marek, M.D is happy to talk about his brainchild, Young Hearts 4 Life.  He is surrounded by students of Barrington High School who are meeting in the gym for a heart screening provided by his organization and sponsored by Good Shepherd Hospital in Barrington.  "It's like talking about my kids," he said.  And, in a way, it is about his kids and everyone else's.

Like most everyone, news stories concerning young people who suddenly drop dead from undetected heart issues, disturbed Marek. "I'm a parent," he said.  "When you hear one of those things, how can your heart not go out to them?  And it's just not the immediate family but the whole community that gets shaken."

As he considered the problem over the years, there seemed to be no easy solutions.  So many kids would need to be screened to detect underlying heart issues; the sheer volume of the action would make it prohibitive.

Then, in 2005 Marek heard about the practice of performing EKG's on young adults in Europe.  Studies proved that tests were able to reduce sudden death rate by 80-90% over a 25-year period when they were administered every two years on young people aged 12 –into their mid twenties.

Encouraged, Marek considered pioneering the practice in the Chicagoland area, initiating a successful pilot screening through his practice: Midwest Heart Specialists. "We just had to figure out how to do it large scale," he says.  "Because these conditions that cause sudden cardiac death, although not rare, they're not common, so you have to test a large number of individuals."

The largest roadblock with that idea was how to staff such an endeavor.  "How are we going to do it with manpower? The nurses can't just take a day off," he recalls thinking.

From that seemingly insurmountable problem, Marek's brainchild was born.  "I came up with this idea of training the parents to do the EKGs," he said.

In 2006, Marek developed a 90-minute training class for volunteers where they learned about sudden cardiac death, and the ins and outs of performing an EKG, finally practicing the procedure on models.  "By the end of that, they're perfectly capable of performing an EKG." Marek said.  The volunteers have just surpassed 50,000 EKGs, according to Marek.  "That's 50,000 hearts beating safer," he remarks.

Although not all cardiac related illnesses are discovered through an EKG, the procedure can detect over 60% of those at risk for sudden death.  "It can't detect them all," he said. "But we didn't think doing nothing would be an appropriate way of dealing with it." 

"It might seem kind of strange that we expend this much effort since there are only 3,000 young adults that die like this each year," Marek points out, obviously taking issue with the word only.  "But that's right in line with other things that we do as a society, that we worry about like firearm deaths, cystic fibrosis.  Even the Middle Eastern war, since its beginning, has been less than 5,000 deaths."

Statistics can tell the story in numbers, but for each number there is a circle of grief that is not as easily presented.   "This (our children) is the resource of our society," Marek said.  "As living creatures we do crazy things for our children.  So we thought we could do something to change that."

Volunteer Mary Wolthusen can bear witness to the havoc sudden cardiac death can reek on those left behind.  In August 2007, Mary's son Dan Woods was 29-years-old when he was found dead from cardiomyopathy.  "His first symptom was that he died," Wolthusen said. 

Overcome by grief, she obsessed about why her young son's life was taken and why she was left behind.  During the same time, Wolthusen heard of the Young Hearts Project a number of times and looked them up on the Internet. By November 2007, she was volunteering with Young Hearts, hoping to save lives and other mother's grief.

As she looks over the young boys of Barrington High School, waiting to have their turn to have their hearts tested, she can't help wonder why some parents don't take advantage of the program.  "For me, it breaks my heart that we don't have 100% participation in school, because it's free," she said. "I don't want another mother to feel the way I do.  Never."

Almost as much as she regrets her son's untimely death, she hopes for another young person who doesn't yet know they have a heart issue.  "If I could have three wishes, one would be that my son is alive.  Another would be that he'd met Dr Marek in time and one would be that every single kid gets screened."  

For more information on Young Hearts 4 Life visit: www.midwestheart.org/young-hearts-for-life