Dr. Carl Vaughan

Screening is becoming more popular in Italy, for example.

Screening is mandatory before participating in athletic sports.

Ireland are catching up and the Lay a Heartbeat programme is an example of that where they've screened over 200,000 people over the last X number of years at different levels, both for sports.

conditions that could cause sudden death in teenagers, such as illustrated in your previous comments, but also conditions in older patients where they may have undiagnosed high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes.

The raison d'être for screening really is to identify disease early and preventing the long-term disabling consequences of the disease.

And when we say screening, what do we mean?

Well, screening is taking generally someone without symptoms and looking for a problem.

For example, measuring someone's cholesterol is screening for high cholesterol that they may not be unaware of.

These are silent killers, high blood pressure, diabetes.

And in terms of heart, does it mean hooking somebody up to a machine?

Cardiac screening generally involves taking a family history, doing a physical exam, listening for murmurs.

They may have undiagnosed valvular disease.

And that screen then could go more advanced if something was picked up on the first pass.

And they may head on and have an echo done or some other more advanced imaging.

In most cases, screening goes well.

But every so often, as we've illustrated in this discussion, a problem such as Jamie, an electrical problem, will be identified and treated.

Which...

There were no symptoms of.

He was a very active, fit young man.

These electrical conditions can be very much a non-off switch.