In Part II, we reviewed the various risk factors associated with silent heart disease. Looking over the last three decades since I wrote my last book, Preventing Silent Heart Disease, I can say with certainty that the world has become a more dangerous place.
There are increased risk factors that we could have never anticipated—an obesity epidemic, an opioid crisis, an increasingly stressful world caused by a nationwide obsession with social media and the inability to untether ourselves from emails and text messaging (even if we were so inclined). “Metabolic syndrome” quite literally was not in our vocabulary when I wrote my previous book in 1989. It’s a cold, hard fact that in 2018 the life expectancy of the average American declined from the previous year, a first in recent times. It’s unlike anything we’ve seen in the last one hundred years. (You have to go back to the early twentieth century to find a decline in life expectancy in the United States, which was largely due to combat deaths during World War I and, most importantly, the devastating Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920.)
On the other hand, we have options for the detection, treatment, and prevention of silent heart disease that we could have never dreamed of thirty years ago: stem cell therapy, 3-D-printed organic tissue, new medications and surgical innovations tailored to specific aspects of cardiac disease, and amazing technology like implantable devices and incredibly accurate wearable health monitors (disguised as smartphones and watches).
All things considered, I remain optimistic. We have made real progress over the last six decades in combatting heart disease and the related condition of stroke, the two biggest causes of death in the United States (not to mention significant progress in treating the third-biggest cause of death, cancer). America’s suddenly shrinking life expectancy stems from failure to detect earlier and treat not coronary heart disease but mainly three preventable causes of death: drug overdose, chronic liver disease (related to drug and alcohol abuse), and suicide.
In this next section of the book, we’ll dive deep into the dazzling array of technology and pharmacology available to us in the very near future. But we’ll begin Part III by reviewing the latest in medications, diagnostics, therapies, and surgical techniques available today.