Healthy Matters - with Dr. David Hilden

S02_E04 - Stayin' Alive! A Q&A with a Cardiologist

January 22, 2023 Hennepin Healthcare Season 2 Episode 4
Healthy Matters - with Dr. David Hilden
S02_E04 - Stayin' Alive! A Q&A with a Cardiologist
Show Notes Transcript

01/22/23

The Healthy Matters Podcast

Season 2 - Episode 04 - Stayin' Alive!  A Q&A with a Cardiologist

There's been a lot of talk about cardiac arrest in the past few weeks, and well, it turns out our hearts are pretty important to us!  But what actually happens when things go wrong?  Does a daily aspirin really help?   And what's the best disco song to perform CPR to?

From Damar Hamlin's on-field scare, to cholesterol, to emergency procedures, there's certainly no shortage of things to talk about when it comes to the heart.  In episode 4, we'll talk with Dr. Lou Kohl, an interventional cardiologist at Hennepin Healthcare, to go over the basics of heart function, ways to keep our hearts healthy, the wide world of stents, and whole lot more.  Join us!

Got a question for the doc?  Or an idea for a show?  Contact us!

Email - healthymatters@hcmed.org

Call - 612-873-TALK (8255)

Twitter - @drdavidhilden

Find out more at www.healthymatters.org


Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Healthy Matters podcast with Dr. David Hilden, primary care physician and acute care hospitalist at Hennepin Healthcare in downtown Minneapolis, where we cover the latest in health healthcare and what matters to you. And now here's our host, Dr. David Hilden.

Speaker 2:

Hey there, it's Dr. David Hilden. When it comes to issues with our organs, perhaps the most common ones we hear of are related to our heart. It's a pretty long list when you think about it. The heart is a complex organ, and thankfully with me today I've got Dr. Lou Cole, interventional cardiologist at Hennepin Healthcare. He's gonna help clarify a few things. Dr. Cole, welcome to the show and thanks for being here. Thanks

Speaker 3:

For having

Speaker 2:

Me. Absolutely. Let's start with a big case in the news lately. So, DeMar Hamlin, a healthy young man who plays for the Buffalo bills of the National Football League, has a collapse on the field. I'm also aware that there was a Danish soccer player, you know, Christian Erickson. He had that in a soccer game a couple years ago. So it's a really scary situation. These are young, healthy people, and it doesn't appear to be isolated. It's happened again a couple of times. So, could you break down for us what maybe happened to these athletes?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's a good question. I think there have been a number of collapses on the field. The athletic put together a nice list of incidents like this that have happened during live sporting events. I, I agree with you completely. The Christian Erickson episode is probably as close as we have to. What happened to DeMar Hamlin in DeMar Hamlin's case? He seemed to get hit in the middle of the chest by the receiver's shoulder, stood up for a sec, and then fell over backwards. Something that would look to us as a physician, a cardiologist, as probably a cardiac arrest, that's a signal that something terrible is going on, and the body's not getting enough blood

Speaker 2:

Flow just going down uncontrolled. That's so scary for in front of a stadium, fool. It,

Speaker 3:

It's super scary. It's super

Speaker 2:

Scary. So, I know we don't know the particulars of these athletes and their health conditions, and we won't speculate on, on about their personal health conditions. You know, they have a right to some, some privacy as well. But what do you think happened? Why would someone's heart just stop like that?

Speaker 3:

The thing that makes the most sense for DeMar Hamlin is he experienced this thing called commotio cordes. And it is the most unlucky of most unlucky circumstances. It is a condition where if you get hit square in the center of the chest, just at the right moment in your heartbeat cycle, the electric cardiac cycle, it can cause your heart to transition from a normal coordinated pumping motion to what we call ventricular fibrillation. The heart just quavering there not pushing any meaningful blood out to the body. There's a couple reason we speculate, we don't know, but we speculate that that's the case for Mr. Hamlin. The first is that he was actually able to get up and he stood up after the day. He stood up and was, you know, normal, got up, just made a tackle, 4, 2, 3, 4 seconds. And just like the hose at your house, when you turn it off at the spigot, there's still a little residual pressure in the hose and a little bit of a little bit of water. In this case, a little bit of blood flow is still coming out, even if the tap is off. And that is really common for one of these ventricular arrhythmias and a rhythm mediated cardiac arrest in that there's a very brief period of time when you still have consciousness, and then the blood pressure, in this case, the water pressure in the case of your hose turns off and then without blood flowing to the brain, eventually the brain says, I'm gonna shut off.

Speaker 2:

So it sounds like Lou, you're saying, is that he had an electrical problem of his heart, which then leads in a couple seconds to, its not pumping. Could you say more about that? What the, what is the electrical versus the, I'll call it the plumbing part of a heart's function?

Speaker 3:

The plumbing of your heart, uh, kind of works in two ways. Do you have pipes that feed your heart muscle with oxygen? When one of those pipes gets plugged, you have a heart attack. And usually that's not a cardiac arrest. Usually don't fall over dead. Usually folks have chest pain or chest pressure or, uh, squeezing sensation or an elephant sitting on their chest. That's sort of our usual kind of classic way. Uh, heart attack presents. And

Speaker 2:

These are your coronary arteries.

Speaker 3:

Coronary arteries, yeah. So

Speaker 2:

People tell me sometimes, well, doesn't the blood, doesn't the heart get blood from that's inside of it? And that's not how it

Speaker 3:

Works. That is not exactly, that is not the case. Your heart actually is the first off-ramp is your pumping chamber pumps blood out of the heart, but that big vessel, the aorta that pumps to the rest of your body, supplies'em all. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. But the, the heart does not get blood from the pumping chamber. It's got its own little set of arteries. And when those get blocked, that causes a heart attack. You know, only a very small portion of heart attacks. Less than 5%. Do folks have a cardiac arrest too? Does the lack of oxygen make the heart muscle electrically unstable? So

Speaker 2:

The electrical, the electrical activity continues on after a heart attack. It does.

Speaker 3:

Usually most people continue living their life. We hear all the time about folks who've had chest pain at home for hours and sometimes days, and do all sorts of stuff. Continue to go to work, continue to, but it

Speaker 2:

Can't be good

Speaker 3:

<laugh> No, it's bad. If you,

Speaker 2:

If you think you're having

Speaker 3:

A heart attack, you should call EMS and get to the hospital.

Speaker 2:

Don't be like driving in. Call nine one one,

Speaker 3:

Call nine one one for sure.

Speaker 2:

So that's the, that's the plumbing, the, the heart, the blood supply that goes to your heart. Right. Tell me about the electrical system.

Speaker 3:

So the, for the heart to pump blood out to the body, uh, is actually a very, uh, elegant, coordinated electrical dance that causes the whole heart to squeeze in unison and pump blood out to the body. There's a whole host of different reasons why that can go awry, but in the case of DeMar Hamlin, probably the Danish soccer player, something has gone horribly wrong and the heart has gone from beating normally in a matter of seconds to beating in a totally uncoordinated fashion that doesn't result in any meaningful pumping out to the body. Could

Speaker 2:

This have been predicted or is this something so out of the blue that there's no, there's no way we could have known?

Speaker 3:

Probably not predictable. There are a series of genetic conditions, things like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a very thickened heart muscle, some other things that they actually screen some European soccer players for, especially in Italy.

Speaker 2:

Um, they, they check for'em before

Speaker 3:

They, they check for'em with echoes and MRIs and all sorts of other heart imaging. But as far as we know, DeMar Hamlin had a totally normal heart.

Speaker 2:

Could we talk a little bit about what was done on that football field on Monday night? Yeah. To that young man. What were those first responders doing?

Speaker 3:

You know, I think that's probably the most important thing that happened for DeMar Hamlin. Uh, folks could tell of wide variety of folks from his teammates and the opposing team to trainers and medical staff on the sidelines. They could tell immediately something was seriously wrong. They rushed out in the field, they assessed him, checked out if he was breathing, if he had a pulse. And when they found that he didn't have a pulse, they started cpr. CPR is just pushing hard and fast a hundred times a minute on the center of someone's chest to move a little bit of blood around the body while the heart's not beating. That is purely a temporizing measure until we can do something more to restart the heart. In the case of Mr. Hamlin, it sounds like they also used an a e d. This is a, an electrical device that sometimes you'll see on the wall at stadiums and shopping malls and office

Speaker 2:

Office buildings office, the gym

Speaker 3:

All

Speaker 2:

Over, all over the

Speaker 3:

Place. They are great. They're super smart these days. It's the equivalent thing to the paddles in er,

Speaker 2:

Like when you see it on the TV show, get the

Speaker 3:

Paddles. It is that just in an, an automated version, if you're somewhere and someone go has a what looks like what you saw with DeMar Hamlin, they pass out backwards. They look like they're not moving or breathing. Someone tells you they can't see a pulse other than calling 9 1 1. If you see an a e d thing around, go grab it off the wall, you can put those patches right on the person. You don't have to be a medical person at

Speaker 2:

All. It tells you how to do it.

Speaker 3:

It, it, it is totally automated. It will analyze the heart rhythm. And if it finds a limited subset of heart rhythms, including this ventricular fibrillation one that we think occurred to DeMar Hamlin, as well as some other ones that are treated by an electrical shock, it will figure that out. It will tell you to get out of the way so you don't get shocked yourself and it will deliver a shock. We understand that that is probably what happened to, to DeMar Hamlin on the field. And once they were able to reset his electrical system with that electrical shock, it started, electrical rhythm is back working normally and pumping some blood to the body.

Speaker 2:

So it was likely that those first responders on that football field by doing chest compressions and by delivering shocks through an a e D, that is what led to his outstanding recovery and the fact that he was a healthy guy. Yeah, but those two things

Speaker 3:

Were 24 year old professional athlete. But yes, those are the things that kept him alive. The C p R got enough blood with oxygen in it, moving around his body so that his brain and the rest of his body could continue to live while he didn't have a heartbeat. Folks out in the community, this is where you can be heroes. If someone has a cardiac arrest and you're waiting five minutes for the paramedics to get there, even if you've never had a c p class, push hard on the center of their chest. It's scary.

Speaker 2:

And push

Speaker 3:

Fast and push fast a hundred times a minute. The thing that we coach people is the song Staying Alive.

Speaker 2:

Staying alive. I was wondering if get a break staying

Speaker 3:

Alive that the beaten, that song's about a hundred a minute. So if you can, if you can push some blood around their body right in the center of their chest, over their sternum, until folks are able to get there, you can save someone's life. You can keep their organs and brain oxygenated enough that after, in some cases a short, in the case of DeMar Hamlin, sometimes a little longer hospital stay during which time everything else gets to recover, they can walk outta the hospital. Yeah,

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Now what about everybody's remembering the old days in the old mouth to mouth resuscitation? Yeah. And everybody's squirmed about that. And do we still do that or is it just literally you come up to'em and start doing chest

Speaker 3:

Compressions? We do it in the hospital, but out in the world, we've taken that out of the guidelines. Just push on their chest. Don't worry about trying to breathe into their mouth. Don't worry about any of that. Um, if someone has had a cardiac arrest and they don't have a pulse, start out by pushing hard and fast on the center of their chest, the medical personnel who respond will take care of the breathing portion. But 99% of the time, unless you think someone's choking on a hotdog, and, and the issue is that you need to give'em the heim lick and get the hotdog outta their throat, you should just push hard and fast on the center of their chest.

Speaker 2:

You mentioned that anybody can do this, and I wanna make sure people hear that anybody can start bystander cpr. What do you think about actually going to a CPR course and getting a little more skills? Do you recommend that?

Speaker 3:

I think in an idealized world, everyone would take a CPR class, kids would take it in school, adults get it with their driver's license or something. But I think it's really a, a very helpful skill for any adult to

Speaker 2:

Have. Yeah. And as one who's done it, and I know you have as well. Yeah. Um, largely in hospital settings, but both of you and I have probably done CPR a lot. Right. Um, you are literally pumping that blood for that person. And, and I like the word you used. You're you're gonna be a hero in that case. Yeah. It really truly does matter. It does. Time matters and doesn't it,

Speaker 3:

It time is the hugest part of this.

Speaker 2:

I mean, don't wait around, get going. Yeah,

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Immediately Call 9 1 1. Or even better, ask someone else to call 9 1 1. Will you start CPR if you're sure that that person doesn't have a pulse?

Speaker 2:

I I I would assume it's relatively easy to find a place where you could learn to do cpr.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. I mean, you can go on the internet and American Heart Association. A lot of local organizations have CPR classes.

Speaker 2:

Maybe your local health club offers a

Speaker 3:

Class even.

Speaker 2:

Exactly. If it's been a while since you've done it, maybe, maybe take a class again, maybe learn again. If it's been 2, 3, 4, 5 years, do it. The guidelines change. It isn't, you know, you're not gonna have to learn how to do mouth to mouth, for instance. Exactly. So if you haven't done it for a while, maybe it's a great time to get relearn it. But even if you haven't taken a course, you can still do CPR and chest compressions.

Speaker 3:

So you can be the difference between someone getting enough oxygen to their brain until the medics get there to be the difference between surviving or not

Speaker 2:

Really important and life-saving tips there. So now we'll take a short break and when we come back, I'm going to continue the conversation with Dr. Luke Cole, who is an interventional cardiologist at Hennepin Healthcare. And we're gonna talk about ways to keep your heart healthy. Stay with us.

Speaker 1:

You are listening to the Healthy Matters podcast with Dr. David Hilden. Got a question or comment for the doc, email us at Healthy matters hc m e d.org or give us a call at six one two eight seven three talk. That's[inaudible] 8 7 3 8 2 5 5. And now let's get back to more healthy conversation.

Speaker 2:

And we're back. We're talking about your heart health with Dr. Luke Cole, who is a cardiologist and a colleague of mine here at Hennepin Healthcare. So Dr. Cole, let's talk about ways to keep your heart healthy. First of all, what about cholesterol? What's the role of cholesterol in heart health?

Speaker 3:

Cholesterol's a big part of heart health. I think of it as almost like a three prong set of risk factors for clogging up the arteries. As we talked about earlier, the plumbing, half of the equation that leads to blockage of blood flow. And then sometimes symptoms. Those three are smoking, smoking, smoking, smoking. Don't do it. If you are smoking, work on not smoking or call quit plan or talk to

Speaker 2:

One of the, and keep trying. Many times you can quit and you should,

Speaker 3:

You can. And it takes the average person, seven tries real tries to quit smoking. So if you've tried three times and you gotta, you had a cigarette again, that makes you normal. Try

Speaker 2:

Again. It's a great point. It makes you normal. Keep trying.

Speaker 3:

Yes, there's, there's probably nothing out there, no medicine we're gonna talk about, not cholesterol as much as I hate to say it, not any blood pressure medicines that I can prescribe as a cardiologist that are as important to keeping your heart and your brain and your whole body healthy as just not smoking.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So that's number one. Risk.

Speaker 3:

Yep. Number two, cholesterol and blood pressure go together. But we're gonna focus on cholesterol cuz your blood pressure, think of it as pushing cholesterol into the walls of the artery. So cholesterol itself, our bodies actually make it. We eat it. Some people are more prone to have high levels, some people are not. Anyone who's 40 or over should check in with their doctor and get a cholesterol check. And if you, uh, have high cholesterol, depending on your other risk factors, your doctor doesn't have to be a cardiologist. It can be an internist, a family practitioner, any primary care doctor should help you work on getting your cholesterol down. Usually that's with a medicine called statin. There's a wide variety of'em. They've got a bad rap in the press, but we've studied them more than any medicine period. And they work, they reduce heart attacks, they reduce strokes, and they bring your cholesterol down.

Speaker 2:

So if your doctor or other healthcare practitioner advises you to take a statin, consider it. Consider it, consider it strongly. Yes,

Speaker 3:

You very much, if you have concerns about statins, express them to your doctor, your, your nurse practitioner, your physician's assistant, whoever that person is, talk to'em about it. But from a medical scientific standpoint, they work and they work really well. And the side effects that are often ascribed to statins are, to be perfectly honest, is just as common in those same clinical trials among folks who are taking a placebo sugar

Speaker 2:

Pill. Yeah. So it wasn't necessarily the statin. People got muscle aches, didn't

Speaker 3:

They do it? Turns out people get muscle aches, whether you're taking a statin or you know, drinking a vitamin water or whatever you are doing.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So risk factors don't smoke. Get your blood pressure and cholesterol under control. What else?

Speaker 3:

You know, I think being physically fit and active is a good thing for your body as a whole. We would love that. We could say as confidently as we do about statins, that being fit prevents heart attack, prevents strokes. I'm not sure if we can say that to the same degree of confidence, but it's just healthy for your whole body. And selfishly, as a cardiologist, I love it when people are fit. It's like they're doing their own stress test every day. Right. And they can tell me, you know, I used to be able to run five miles, but now when I get to three I'm really short winded or I'm starting to have this discomfort in my chest. That is so helpful. And for folks who are not fit, you're not asking much of your heart. And so it's really hard to get that advanced warning of something's wrong if you're not doing much. And there's a lot of folks out there who have a lot of limitations.

Speaker 2:

What about aspirin? It used to be that we want that we practically put it in the water supply and we told everybody, ah, take an aspirin. You're gonna live forever. You'll never have a heart attack. That is no longer the case. Is it? That's not the guidelines.

Speaker 3:

That is not the guidelines. And, and I think a couple years ago there was a new guideline put up by the US Preventative Services task force and it was, could have been done a little better. Um, a lot of folks came to our clinics who should be on an aspirin and said, Hey, I heard in the news and I'm not supposed to be on aspirin anymore. And that was the message that was put out. But really what that guideline was discussing was should people who've never had any heart thing, never had a stroke, never had a, what we call peripheral arterial disease or a stent in their leg. Or should people who are healthy, should they be taking an aspirin to prevent heart attacks in stroke? And it turns out that except for a very, very select subset of people who have super high risk, you probably shouldn't be taking an aspirin every day. Not because it doesn't decrease the risk of heart attack and stroke a little bit. It actually does. But like all medicines and all things in life, there's a flip side in that aspirin is also a very mild anti-platelet medicine. Uh, think of it like a blood thinner and it also increases your risk of bleeding a little bit. And so for healthy folks, it actually, the bleeding risk offset the, the good that the aspirin was causing.

Speaker 2:

So the average person, now we can't say specifically Yeah. Right now what everybody should do. But the average person maybe doesn't need an aspirin. Is there somebody that should be taking a daily aspirin?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So what that guideline did not change at all is if you've had a heart attack before or you've had a stent or you've had a bypass or you've had a stroke, you've had a leg artery issue or a carotid artery issue, in that case, your risk of having another event is much, much higher. And the risk benefit balance is very different. And they should very much stay on aspirin

Speaker 2:

<laugh>. So if you are listening to this and you're not sure, talk to your doctor. Yeah. Talk to your cardiologist. You may or may not need to be on one, but it, it's a little bit more nuanced then everybody should or everybody shouldn't.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. It, it used to be really easy for us. Yeah. Just as you see that be on an aspirin, it'll help you. It's risk free. I think we've, we've grown up a little bit in medicine and starting to acknowledge that everything, even aspirin does carry a little bit of risk and we want to use it in a way that helps people and doesn't cause them harm.

Speaker 2:

Right. You know, it came from the bark of a willow trees. It's so long ago that there weren't any like regulations for approving it. If aspirin were invented today, would've to go through some trials and there'd be like safety warnings and things. All

Speaker 3:

Those things. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Can I ask you one other thing cuz I can't resist. You're an interventional cardiologist. This is an opportunity to ask the guy who actually does it. When you put a stent in a person, whether it's for chronic angina, chronic chest pain, or what we do a lot of here, if you've had a heart attack and an arteries blocked, can you just briefly explain to us what you're doing?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely. In the cath lab, the cardiac cath lab where I work and I do my interventional cardiology work, we start by taking x-ray movie pictures of a person's heart arteries. Once we get those pictures, sometimes we see a severe narrowing or a blockage. If we do find a blockage, we'll say in the case of an acute heart attack, we actually take a tiny little wire, 14,007 inch, we wiggle it down the artery through a small tube that extends from either your wrist or the creas, your hip up to your heart. We take that wire, we wiggle it through the clot that is blocking off the heart artery. And then we start out by using a balloon of all things. It runs over that wire, just like a train on a train track. In this case it'd be a monorail, but a single hole in that balloon slides over our wire and we inflate the balloon and the balloon pushes aside the clot or in some cases

Speaker 2:

To the sides Yes.

Speaker 3:

Pushes it to the sides. And I think the question we always get is, well, did you take the stuff out? Did you like suck it out with a vacuum cleaner ro aro or whatever? And, and it turns out we don't because your body is really amazing. Really what we need to do is restore blood flow. The body's blood circulatory system is full of enzymes that dissolve blood clot, but the only work, if a fresh supply of blood is able to flow by there and attack that clot. So we just push the stuff to the side enough to start restoring blood flow. Once we get that going, that's great. Ultimately we stabilize things by putting in this metal mesh tube called a stent that gets pushed up with another balloon, essentially into the sides of the arteries. And that becomes like a scaffold or like the two by four is inside your wall and your body actually heals over it. So that six months to a year down the pike, if you could miniaturize yourself like Rick Morans and Yeah. Honey or

Speaker 2:

Shrunk the kids imagine school

Speaker 3:

Bus. Exactly. Go inside your artery and look around. You wouldn't necessarily see any metal. Your the skin lining, the endothelium inside your heart artery would've healed over that stent and it's just in there holding the whole thing open. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Okay. I have seen you, I've seen interventional cardiologists do it. I've actually seen Dr. Colder, I've stood over your shoulder because he's been very kind and allowed me to stand there and watch this. Explain to us how you inflate that balloon. What are you talking about? You have, is it like playing a video game? Do you have instruments or how do you inflate the balloon? How do you

Speaker 3:

Do that? Yeah. We have, we have this device that's actually filled with fluid cuz we can control it more precisely than blowing up air or, you know, helium. It's almost like a hydraulic device that very precisely adds fluid to the balloon and then measures the pressure inside the balloon. And it actually, when we deploy a stent, we use quite high pressures. 12, 16, 18 atmospheres worth of pressure. Wow. To really push it into the side of the artery. It's gonna stay there once you get a stent put in. And it is there forever.

Speaker 2:

It's yours for life. Part of you now. But it, it strikes me as, uh, dangerous if you're, if you're blown up a balloon in there, aren't you clogging the artery

Speaker 3:

Temporarily?

Speaker 2:

So you, you're, you're not in there for a long time.

Speaker 3:

No, in modern days. Maybe a minute. Yeah. Do we have the balloon up? Mm-hmm.<affirmative> to implant that stent. Usually more like 30 seconds. Yeah. And the, the body's amazing. The body's very tolerant and it can tolerate 20, 30 seconds of impaired blood flow. In the case of a heart attack, you started out with a blocked off artery.

Speaker 2:

It was blocked already. It

Speaker 3:

Was blocked already. And so we're it's all, it's all gravy from there. We're gonna get it.

Speaker 2:

Exactly. Hey, before I let you go, let's, I wanna just circle back one more time to the importance of C P r. Briefly. What should people do if they are the first one on the scene with someone in a cardiac arrest? Because I don't want this point to get lost.

Speaker 3:

Again, if you come upon a person who is passed out, they're, they're not responding. Shake'em hard, yell at'em. See if they respond. If they don't, the first thing you should do is probably call 9 1 1. Or if there's another person with you, ask that person to call 9 1 1. That activates the medical system. That gets paramedics, some first responders there on the scene as soon as they can. The second thing you should do, if you know how to do it, check if they have a pulse. Feel it, their wrist feel on the side of their neck. Especially if you have some medical training and you have a reasonable sense of where to find a pulse and it's not there. Start c p r push hard and fast on the center of their chest. Folks might wonder, well, what if, what if I just didn't find the pulse? Does it happen? Absolutely. It happens among medical professionals. Turns out, if that person is awake at all, you are not gonna hurt them by doing cpr R they're gonna sit up and they're gonna,

Speaker 2:

They're gonna let you, you know, uh, no, I was just resting. Yes,

Speaker 3:

Exactly.<laugh>. So err on the side of doing it. Someone who is awake is not gonna let you do CPR on them.

Speaker 2:

<laugh>. Yep. You know that's true. Okay. So prompt c P r if you can find an a, e d to defibrillate, do that. That's what helped the are the athletes that we started this show with. And so I wanna end on a positive note. If you do those things are the outcomes, can they be okay?

Speaker 3:

We have folks who come to our facility after having cardiac arrests at their workplaces downtown at US Bank Stadium across the street, all manner of places who have very much walked out of the hospital as normal human beings without any deficit. Does that happen 100% of the time? I wish I could say that. It does not, but it does happen. And the common theme among those folks who, who walk out of the hospital with normal brains and normal hearts and well-functioning bodies, is usually that they got prompt medical attention. Many times they got CPR either from a medical professional who is nearby or a bystander. And then we were able to figure out what was going on and address it rapidly.

Speaker 2:

Great information for all of us. Lou, thanks for being here.

Speaker 3:

Thanks for having me. David.

Speaker 2:

We've been talking with Dr. Luke Cole, interventional cardiologist here at Hennepin Healthcare with me in downtown Minneapolis. I hope you've learned something from this show as I have. It's been a great episode. Thanks for tuning in and I hope you'll join us for our next episode. And in the meantime, be healthy and be well.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the Healthy Matters podcast with Dr. David Hilden. To find out more about the Healthy Matters podcast or browse the archive, visit healthy matters.org. You got a question or a comment for the show? Email us at Healthy Matters hc m e d.org or call 6 1 2 8 7 3 talk. There's also a link in the show notes. And finally, if you enjoy the show, please leave us a review and share the show with others. The Healthy Matters Podcast is made possible by Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and engineered and produced by John Lucas At Highball Executive producers are Jonathan Comito and Christine Hill. Please remember, we can only give general medical advice during this program, and every case is unique. We urge you to consult with your physician if you have a more serious or pressing health concern. Until next time, be healthy and be well.