Dr. Jason Robin’s leadership and experience in cardiac care here at Generations at Regency has been an integral part of our program. Recently he answered questions for an article with the Daily Herald on some things everyone should know about cardiac care.
Highlights from the article:
Q: You hear about “personalized or precision medicine,” but what role is it playing in cardiac care? Is there a genetic component that can assessed in heart health?
A: While cardiovascular medicine is behind oncology with respect to targeting “bad genes,” in some patients with family histories of heart muscle disease (cardiomyopathy) or dangerous rhythm disorders of the heart (arrhythmias), we do have commercially available genetic testing to help guide management by either treating the cardiomyopathy earlier to prevent further deterioration of the heart muscle or implanting devices to help prevent dangerous arrhythmias from causing clinical problems.
Otherwise, we are still using traditional risk factors such as family history, high blood pressure, cholesterol levels, diabetes, smoking and age to determine what one’s risk of having a cardiovascular event is.
We can use these variables to determine how likely one is to have a cardiovascular event not only over the next decade, but also during the course of one’s life. This calculation allows us to determine how aggressively we should be treating each patient, especially with statin drugs which are well-known to significantly reduce the incidence of a heart attack.
Read more on the Daily Herald and learn about our program
