TV Personality Bob Harper discusses some of the signs and symptoms he endured from surviving a heart attack himself.
Prescription for health your heart and you i’m dr jen ashton as you’ve just heard heart disease is the rampaging number one killer in america causing an astonishing one in every four deaths in this country add covet 19 into the mix and the urgency of heart health awareness amplifies whether you or someone you love is at risk everyone should familiarize themselves
Right now with this crucial and potentially life-saving info on just how heart disease is most often detected how it’s treated and how those you love can avoid becoming another statistic i remember one of my doctors said to me if you could talk to your heart right now what would you say and the first thing i said was why did you give up on me i was basically
A walking time bomb that night it was just a matter of when the bomb was going to go off i didn’t realize that i had this silent killer in me i was going to be a guy in a casket with a six-pack heart disease the nation’s number one killer claims one life every 36 seconds nearly half of americans have a heart disease risk factor the beautiful thing about heart
Disease whether you have some of these new unique risk factors is that 90 of heart disease is completely preventable the bottom line for the public is know your risk factors doctors nationwide are concerned about heart disease seen in patients presenting with one of three different risk categories typical risk invisible risk and a new risk from covid they said
If it wasn’t the heart attack that was going to kill me that night it could have been the diabetes my blood sugar was 580. kristin is a typical risk patient someone with an underlying medical condition that increases their chance of developing heart disease the top five risk factors for heart disease are high blood pressure so what is my blood pressure number
Am i a diabetic what is my cholesterol obviously no one should be smoking and then your family history i died twice on the table they had to do manual cpr twice and shock me 15 times they called a clergy person for me and i just held her hand and i just told her i loved her it really wasn’t until about nine days later when they took the intubation tubes out
That i understood fully what had happened invisible risk patients have no underlying conditions but risk factors hide in their dna health and fitness expert bob harper was one of these patients big hole you may know him as the biggest loser’s long time trainer turned host i was in my gym working out and the next thing i knew i was waking up in a hospital two
Days later being told not only did i have a heart attack but i had gone into cardiac arrest and it was the quick thinking of the people in that gym to call 9-1-1 and there happened to be a doctor in the gym that day i was embarrassed i thought how did this happen to me what you’re doing you’re actually programming again george garrett has a new risk that doctors
Are monitoring one fueled by covid19 there are some patients who have covet and they get what we call myocarditis which is inflammation of the heart muscle it is a very small subset of the covet population but it does happen i’ve never had any history of heart conditions prior to this didn’t have an active infection my wife was able to visit me and that’s the
Day the atrial fibrillation began one of the darkest moments of my life was when they took him to shock his heart i was scared i would never see him again but doctors say there is hope and it’s all about understanding your risk i’m doing the best i can to move my life forward i still coach football i’m still coaching track i’ll more than likely tell my players
To pay close attention to their body and listen to it you can’t wait until you’re in your 30s to start caring about what happens to your heart if you feel off don’t ignore it go get checked i am so lucky to be sitting here in my house right now and i realize that our lives can just go in a second so as you’ve just seen it is so important to recognize that you
Or someone you love may still be at risk even without any of those telltale risk factors hi everyone george stephanopoulos here thanks for checking out the abc news youtube channel if you’d like to get more videos show highlights and watch live event coverage click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel and don’t forget to download the abc news app
For breaking news alerts thanks for watching
Transcribed from video
What are the telltale signs of heart disease? By ABC News
