Pierre Elias

But unfortunately, by the morning, he was in multi-organ failure.

He arrested and he passed away.

This was a gentleman who otherwise had no past medical history, was otherwise healthy.

And I will never forget having to sit down with his partner and say, I'm so sorry, there's nothing I can do for him.

The thing I became convinced of was if we had just known about this disease, we would have been able to do something about it.

He could have gotten a same-day outpatient procedure, and I think he'd be alive today.

So how rare or difficult to detect is this disease?

This is the fundamental challenge in all of medicine, is you can't treat the patient you don't know about.

Oftentimes we're waiting until patients develop symptoms, but for many diseases, symptoms are a late presenting case.

I became obsessed with this question, which is we don't have a screening test for the most common cause of death in the world, which is most forms of cardiovascular disease.

And the reason for that's relatively straightforward.

The way that we diagnose most forms of cardiovascular disease today is either too invasive or too expensive to do at a population level.

Too invasive would be what?

Cardiac catheterization, where we poke you in your arm or your groin and then we shoot some dye into the vessels of the heart to take a look at them.

Never.

You would never do a cardiac catheterization on a healthy patient.

Patients would be presenting with symptoms like chest pain or inability to exercise before you would consider doing a cardiac catheterization.

Okay.

And the too expensive option then would be what?

It would be an echocardiogram, which is an ultrasound of the heart.