Professor Matthew Kiernan

No, thanks very much, Mark.

And I really appreciate what you're doing for the community to raise awareness of brain health, mental health.

It's a huge topic.

I mean, I was shocked when I became aware that

Well, I think it's a combination of both of those factors.

But really, you know, as a doctor, when I was a junior doctor, cardiovascular health was the key focus.

And, you know, there was bypass surgery and people having heart attacks and it was the number one.

And so understandably, you know, politicians in the community put a focus on trying to

understand the condition and treat it.

And I think that's really the gold standard to understand that heart health and heart disease, you have to look after vascular health, stop smoking, understand the risk factors, cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar levels.

And it was with that understanding and then some therapies coming through.

And I think everyone would accept that the statin evolution has changed cardiovascular health.

And then a biomarker, so understanding that we can treat against cholesterol.

And gradually you started to see cardiovascular deaths going down.

In my field in neurology, stroke was always going up every single year, higher and higher and higher.

And then eventually they did an epidemiological study and they saw that stroke was dropping.

And the neurologists didn't actually believe it.

Like, how could this be the case?

They repeated the study, and sure enough, stroke was actually dropping.

And it's because we've learned from the vascular health approaches from, you know, cardiologists and heart physicians, and the same thing has happened.