WEBVTT
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This program is designed to provide general information with regards
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to the subject matters covered. This information is given with
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the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station
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are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial,
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legal counseling, professional service, or any advice.
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You should seek the services.
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Of competent professionals before applying or trying any suggested ideas.
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Hello, and thank you for tuning in to a Sharp
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Outlook on pay for HD radio and Talk or TV.
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I am Angela Sharp, your host. Our arm chair discussions
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with industry experts will give you the steps, tools and
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information to be successful in business and to prepare you
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to be your best self. Hello, I'm Angela Sharp, and
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I'm happy that you've tuned in today. We have a
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very important topic to discuss with you, cardiovascular disease and
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what we're going to tell you today is probably something
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you've never heard of, but what you don't know can
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hurt you. And so we're going to get into that
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topic and I have two wonderful guests that's going to
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explain everything to you. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause
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of death or adults in the United States, resulting in
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one death every thirty three seconds. According to the Centers
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for Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease doesn't always start
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with lifestyle. It often starts in your DNA. Imagine that
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what you don't know can hurt you. The mission of
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the Family Heart Foundation, one of our guest is here
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from there, is to save generations of families from heart
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disease through timely identification and improve care of familiar hyper
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cholesterolemia I call it FH and elevated lipoprotein LP little A.
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FH is a genetic lipid disorder, the type of high
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cholesterol folks say runs in the family. The Family Heart
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Foundation is pioneering research, advocacy, and education to help prevent
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heart attacks and strokes caused by elevated lipoprotein A little
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A and familiar hypercholesterolemia FH, two inherited disorders that have
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an impact across generations. They play a critical role in
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driving change and empowering families to navigate their own health.
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The Family Heart Foundation explores the world of inherited cardiovascular conditions,
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including as I said, FH and LPA little A, and
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how they silently shape the health of entire families. In
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this episode, we will sit down and talk about patients, families, conditions,
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and advocates and what it really means when heart disease
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runs in the family. My guests today are very knowledgeable
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about this information. Today I have Casey Milligan Walsh, a
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Family Heart Foundation board member and ambassador and author of
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the memoir The Full Catastrophe, and and Dodge, a nurse
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practitioner with a specialty and lipid disorders who's a senior
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care navigator for the Family Heart Foundation. Casey Milligan Walsh
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has written for The New York Times, Helfington Post, Next Avenue,
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Modern Laws, Hippocampus, Splitlip Magazine, and numerous other outlets. Winning
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memoir The Full Catastrophe All I Ever Wanted? Everything I
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Feared is one of the only mainstream books to discuss
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this familiar hypercolt cholesterolemium and illustrate the impact of early
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deaths due to undiagnosed treatable lipid disorders on surviving children.
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Casey also serves as a board member and ambassador for
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the Family Heart Foundation and Anne Dodge, the senior care
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navigator Family Heart Foundation. She completed her Bachelor of Nursing
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degree at Duke University and her master degree in the
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Pediatric Nurse Practitioner program at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
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She helped implement the first pediatric lipid clinic in Wisconsin
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fourteen years ago, research publications in the areas of pediatric
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lipid screening and pediatric familiar hypercholesterolemia. She is passionate about
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providing education and support to individuals and families with genetic
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cholesterol diseases and other cardiac risk factors, as well as
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improving screening rates in children. She joined the Family Heart
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Foundation as a care navigator after her retirement from the
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lipid clinic. She enjoys the lakes in the north Woods,
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picklebar ball, and spending time with her grandchildren. I like
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to invite my guests to the show right now so
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we can talk about this very important topic that affects
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families and they don't move about it. Hi, ladies, thank
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you for coming.
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Thank you so much for having us.
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Okaysei, I understand you wrote a book about this particular topic.
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Can you tell us more as to what made you
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write this book and what was going on in your life?
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Absolutely well, of course, we are here today to talk
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about familial hypercholesterolemia FH and elevated lipoprotein little A or
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LP little A. In my case, it was FH that
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affected my family. And you know, as you said, we're
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both here from the Family Heart Foundation. I'm a retired
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speech language pathologist and I've been an ambassador in a
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board since twenty eighteen and now a board member for
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a couple of years. My book, The Full Catastrophe, the
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title is taken from zorb the Greek where he the
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boss asked Zoraba, are you married? And he says, of course,
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am I not a man? Of course I'm married. I
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have it all, the wife, children have everything. The full catastrophe,
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so full catastrophe is meant to talk about the enormity
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of life, the good, the bad, the struggles, all of
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the things that make up a full life.
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And of course, in my.
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Story, the full catastrophe kind of has a double meaning
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because I wanted that full catastrophe and then I got
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sort of a literal catastrophe, but just a brief story.
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Synopsis of the book will which will kind of help
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explain why I wrote it. It's really a hopeful story
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of the search for belonging after repeated loss, and navigating
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uncertainty and learning to live with grief beside joy. And
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I like to say that first because the plot sounds
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pretty dismal, and it is a hopeful, joyful book. But
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if I talk about the plot first, it doesn't seem
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that way. So I was orphaned at twelve. My parents
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died within ten months of each other. My father died
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of a heart attack at fifty. My mother had breast cancer,
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so she was the one that was expected to die,
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and then my father died suddenly. And then I lost
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my only sibling at twenty. He died of a heart
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attack at twenty seven, completely unexpectedly, of course, And so
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that really set me off on a search for belonging,
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a search for home that rose above every other goal
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I had in life. And so I married and had
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three children and thought I'd created that life that I'd
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searched for. But when my marriage began to fall apart,
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I embraced kind of a new sort of spirituality that
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carried me through a hostile divorce and a contentious custody battle.
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But then the unthinkable happened. My twenty year old son died,
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and not from FH, though he did have FH. But
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he died in a single car crash, and of course
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that loss was devastating, but the spiritual strength I had
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cultivated really, you know, carried me through, helped me navigate
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my grief and find a deeper sense of belonging. And
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through it all, i'd say, I learned that life rarely
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goes according to plan, but even in the most heartbreaking moments,
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there's room for you know, hope and unexpected peace. And
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it really is about embracing that full catastrophe of life.
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And I tell you all of that, and you mentioned
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this in the beginning, but part of one of the
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many reasons I wrote the book is and I think
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maybe I didn't know this until I was writing it, right,
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you know, you learn a lot as you write that.
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It does really illustrate how the lives of children who
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are left or even you know, surviving young adults after
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early loss, those losses really impact the decisions they make
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for the rest of their lives. And in my case,
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two out of three of those losses were due to
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a highly treatable, common undiagnosed genetic lipid disorder. In my case,
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it was familial hypercholesterolemia, And so that's a big reason
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that the foundation exists so we can prevent this from
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happening for other people. You know, I think this book
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is likely the only mass consumption book, not a medical
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book or a self help book where I don't just say, oh,
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my father died of a heart attack. I talk I
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call it by name, I talk about, you know, just broadly,
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what the diagnosis points are, and I think it also
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illustrates it. For many of us with these disorders, grief
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is kind of the elephant in the room. I mean,
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I do a lot of work in the grief space,
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and I write a lot about grief. But for most
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of us, hopefully fewer these days, as children are getting
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diagnosed earlier, we have a lot of early loss in
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our families because these disorders weren't diagnosed in decades past.
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You know, after my brother died, I was twenty A
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year later I was diagnosed, which is pretty remarkable considering
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that was nineteen seventy six and a lot of people
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are not accurately diagnosed even now. And then subsequently, two
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of my three children were diagnosed with FH, and one
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of my great grandchildren has FH and and when she speaks,
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I'm sure we'll talk about how it's inherited and how
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common it is for that many family members to already
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have it. And I think that's about everything I want
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to say for right now. I know Anne has a
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lot to add.
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Yeah, absolutely, I just want to say, I'm I'm really
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sorry for your losses. I I haven't experienced a child,
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but I just recall. And this is why this topic
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is so important. There's been a lot of heart disease
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in my family. And I remember my brother who had
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been in the military and he came home and he
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passed away. In fact, no one knows knew that he
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was ill. His friends found him. He had been deceased
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for like four days.
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I'm so sorry, and.
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It was a massive heart attack. He was in that
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reading the Bible. It was on his chest when they
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found him. And no one knows, I mean, because he
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was strong and healthy and happened. And so, you know,
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I want to know what's in my family, you know, genetics,
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so that I can you know, let my children and
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children's children and children's child children to be avoid some
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of these things happening. You know, like that, you know,
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you know, listening to what a Casey was saying, and
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can you give us a little more perspective as to
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what this problem is and why was the Family Heart
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Foundation originally created.
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Sure, thank you and thank you for having me. And
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that's a great question. Our CEO. Her name is Catherine Wilman,
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and she created the foundation, I believe in twenty eleven.
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She was thirty nine years old, out gardening, super healthy, active,
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you know, looked like perfect health.
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And she was having chest.
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Pain and so she called the ambulance and they were
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like reluctant to take her in because they're like, it's
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not a heart attack, You're fine. And it kept getting worse,
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and she went in and she was having a heart
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attack and by the next day she'd had bypass surgery.
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At age thirty nine, she found out that she had
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an LDL club stroll in the three hundreds, which she
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knew someone early on in her life had told her
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that it was elevated, that nobody knew what it was
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or did anything about it. Well, that's a key signal
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for familial HYPERCHOLESTEROLENEA or FH. There's two key signals for it.
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You don't need genetic testing to diagnose this. The signals
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are a very high LDL which will be present at
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least since age two. For kids, children it would be
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an LDL generally greater than one sixty. For adults, the
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LDL would generally be greater than one ninety. Normal LDL
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for any healthy person adult is less than one hundred.
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So when you get to that one sixty.
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And one ninety range, and then you have a family
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history of it runs in the family, or an early
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heart attack or early stroke. Even those two criteria, the
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early family history and the high LDL since early on
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our meet diagnostic criteria for familial HYPERCHOLESTEROLENEA. So Catherine took
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this energy and probably anger. I would imagine that no
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one knew about what she had I and she translated
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this into this incredible worldwide foundation. Like you said, we
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do research, advocacy, and education, and we have this incredible
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group of almost three hundred ambassadors like Casey around the
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country to help move.
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The word around.
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And we've developed free screening programs for this which I
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can go into later as well.
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Oh wow, incredible. So we're not talking about that this
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being a rare disease. You're saying that there are certain
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symptoms that when we're talking to our doctors, are they
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aware that this might be leading to this condition.
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Yeah, that's a great question.
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So familiar hypercholesterolemia is the genetic disease that has the
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highest mortality rate of any genetic disease, and hardly anyone
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knows knows about it, even doctors. It's very common. It
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affects one in two hundred and fifty people, and each
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of those people that has the disease has a fifty
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to fifty chance passing on to each of their offspring.
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So if like Casey having it having three children, two
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of her children had it, so you either pass it
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on or you don't. There's no gray area because it's
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a dominant genetic condition. So unfortunately doctors are not diagnosing
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them properly and are often unaware of it. In fact,
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only ten percent, maybe fifteen percent of people in the