Скачать или смотреть Bonus Episode: Heart Month Deep Dive

Dr. Alessi revisits his American Heart Month conversation with UConn Health cardiologist Dr. Peter Schulman, drilling down on advances in prevention, treatment, and management of heart disease, heart attack, and heart failure, how they've changed over the years, and further changes potentially on the horizon.



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Transcript


Dr. Alessi: Welcome to the Healthy Rounds Podcast, where we provide you with up-to-date, timely medical information from national and international leaders in their fields. This podcast is brought to you by UConn Health, with support from the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and a grant from Coverys. It is not designed to direct your personal health care, which should only be done by your personal physician.



I’m your host, Dr. Anthony Alessi, and it’s great to be with you on what has become known as our deep dive. And this particular episode of our deep dive is dedicated to a show we did with Dr. Peter Schulman last week. As you’ll recall, Dr. Schulman is a cardiologist and professor of medicine here at the University of Connecticut, where he has practiced for 44 years, and he has been a cardiologist for longer than that.



But before we get to Dr. Schulman, I want to go back to something that was discussed in a previous episode with Dr. Juthani, and that was the use of messenger RNA. We’re hearing a lot about that this week, because the Food and Drug Administration refused to review a flu vaccine that is based on messenger RNA, that’s put out by the Moderna company. And they really haven’t given good reason for why they have refused to review this.



Now, let’s take a step back, because we know that the current administration has stopped research to the degree of $500 million cut, just on the topic of messenger RNA. And that’s because there is misinformation out there -- I almost think it’s disinformation, but it’s misinformation -- that messenger RNA, somehow changes a cell structure, and that’s not the case at all. Dr. Juthani used a good example of it, but I’m going to go a step further.



Messenger RNA is just that. It’s a messenger. It brings a message to a cell. Think about it this way: If you were to order food from Uber Eats or DoorDash, right, that food is brought to your door by a messenger, he leaves the food and then leaves your premises.



Think of messenger RNA as just being that messenger. He doesn’t come in your house and start telling you how to rearrange your furniture. He just brings the message about what it is your body needs to be fighting, in this case, the flu.



Now, one of our problems is that we keep coming up a little bit off target when it comes to influenza, and Dr. Juthani explained that it’s because we have to decide in February. So right now in February, we’re deciding what flu we’re going to be fighting in the fall. We base that on information that we get from the southern hemisphere with the flu. That is the flu strain that is most prominent there. It takes a long time because you grow it in eggs and that’s how you produce the vaccine messenger RNA.



And thanks to Operation Warp Speed, we are now able to come up with a vaccine in a much shorter period of time. So let’s think about it. If we could do it in a shorter period of time, we will have a better idea of what our target is. For influenza that year. So now we’re talking about instead of February, possibly doing it in May or June when we have a better idea of the target and a better chance of hitting it. So again, I want to emphasize the fact that messenger RNA is purely a messenger and it’s not changing your cell structure in any way.



But let’s get to our discussion with Dr. Schulman, which we put out on the airwaves on February 9, and that is, we wanted to get him on because this is American Heart Month. That’s something that was started in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson, and they did it to coincide with Valentine’s Day and the heart. And I guess, many of you listeners are probably my age or thereabouts. And remember, the one thing about the heart I remember is, Dr. Christian Barnard, right? Dr. Barnard, on December 3, 1967, he performed the first human heart transplant into a fellow by the name of Louis Washkansky in South Africa. Now it only lasted 18 days and, and that was ostensibly because we didn’t really have immune-suppressant drugs that would avoid th...