Podcast #15: Silent Signals: What Your Heart’s Telling Your Doctor with Dr. Jose Banchs
By
Leonard Zwelling
We are continuing our probe into what patients need to know about cardiac risk and cardiac screening. This episode will examine what your doctor ought to be doing in the way of testing for cardiac disease. This testing along with the risk assessment we discussed last time, can be used to detect problems when they are small and more easily treated.
It seems so basic, but a good personal history (any chest pain, shortness of breath, or detected unusual heart beats?) or family history (first-degree relatives with documented cardiac disease) can alert your primary care doctor to possible heart disease.
The doctors on this podcast may be old-fashioned, but we still believe in doing a good physical exam with special attention to listening to heart with a stethoscope. This can alert primary care doctors to valvular cardiac disease. Of course, checking blood pressure is essential in a good physical exam and ought to be done with the patient sitting and standing, and in both arms to check for easily detectable heart or vascular problems.
We discuss the utility of the classical electrocardiogram to detect abnormalities of rhythm and even coronary insufficiency. Echocardiograms are non-invasive examinations of the structure of the heart and its valves, too. A newer test for coronary disease is the high-resolution CT angiogram, which is also non-invasive and can provide doctors with a great deal of information about blood flow to the heart muscle.
We also touch upon a topic to which we will return—sleep apnea. This is a disorder of breathing during sleep that can be associated with significant clinical consequences and is often detected by cardiologists now. Certain arrhythmias detected on the EKG can alert a clever clinician to the possibility of sleep apnea.
Finally, Dr. Banchs discusses his own research on phospholipid bubbles to improve cardiac imaging, especially of the heart valves. This is just one method being used to improve cardiac diagnostics without invasive technology like angiography or surgery and which may have implications in other areas of medicine like cancer detection.
As always, the podcast can be found at:
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@anewprescriptionyoutube
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-new-prescription/id1791843323
Spotify: A New Prescription | Podcast on Spotify
Website: A New Prescription | RSS.com
We’d love to continue this conversation so please visit @anewpresciption on major social platforms:
