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Chapter 1: What heart-related issues affect young people in Ireland?
Every year in Ireland, medics estimate about 200 people under the age of 35 die suddenly, a significant number of them from heart-related issues. Some of these issues could be picked up if more people presented for heart screening or were able to avail of screening services.
Our reporter Brian O'Connell has been speaking to one family in Dublin who are hugely grateful for a chance screening opportunity. Morning, Brian. Morning, David.
Who did you meet? Well, I spoke with Father and Son Ger and Jamie Moran from Dublin. Jamie is a very good soccer player. He's 16 years old now. He was very, very fit, box-to-box midfielder, showing a lot of promise from a young age and very dedicated to all-round fitness, to his strength, to his conditioning. Jamie's father, Gerard, told me firstly just about how fit his son was.
Jamie had been heavily involved in soccer in particular from the age of five or six, from his first mini World Cup, right up to playing for his local club in Firhouse and then progressing on to a bigger community club in Knock Line in 2022 and 2023. He was leading the club, leading his team from midfield, won a couple of league titles, Player of the Year, all that sort of stuff.
And right up until March of 2024, you would look at him and go, he's the engine. He's the engine room. He's up and down the pitch and fit and healthy.
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Chapter 2: Who are the Moran family and what is their story?
And like a lot of teenagers, chipped out of marble, looked very, very fit and healthy. And then on the 5th of March, we'd gotten notification of the availability of a heartbeat screening. in school and Jamie's reaction was, yeah, I'm happy to do it because I'll probably get out of class for half an hour. And our reaction was, look, if it's covered by Léa, then why not?
We've got to lose, so may as well do it. And they did that on the 5th of March in 2024. And even reading the small print, one out of 600, one out of 700 people might get a phone call thereafter. And my phone rang the following morning.
And it was feedback that they had found an anomaly in how his heart operates, which indicated what's known as Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, which is an extra electrical kind of signal pulsing in his heart. And at high levels of exercise and activity, it can get erratic and can trigger, you know, kind of very unfortunate circumstances.
We had to approach it from the point of view of telling a fish not to swim because if he wasn't doing his press-ups at home and his workouts at home, he was at the wall kicking the ball around or he was up on the green with his friends or he was training with his team. He was constantly active.
But with this anomaly being found, the word was all physical activity right down to a very small push-up had to stop.
OK, so Jamie took the chance to duck out of class, but it had a really huge benefit in terms of his health.
Yeah, as you heard, his health insurer were doing these heart screening in his school and it was the allure of time out of class. Thinking it wouldn't lead to anything really major, he went for it. And it was his parents really who were contacted a day or so later and told that he had this particular condition which involves really an extra electrical pathway in the heart.
This meant he had to, as you heard, stop all exercise. He had to undergo treatment. Now, Jamie told me how he reacted to getting this shock diagnosis, and we'll hear from his dad here as well in this clip.
It was a big shock for many reasons because, obviously, I was very fit at the time and doing sports, so I didn't think it would be possible, really. I had no symptoms. Yeah, it was just a big shock because me as well, I'm not good with hospitals or surgeries or anything like that, so that scared me as well. But when I heard the news as well, I just couldn't really believe it.
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Chapter 3: What screening opportunity did Jamie Moran participate in?
These electrical conditions can be very much a non-off switch. You're absolutely fine until you keel over. And there are a number of electrical abnormalities that can be picked up on the ECG that would identify a future risk. The statistics out there for sudden death in people under 35 is about 200 a year, apparently, in Ireland, which is very high. Now, they wouldn't all be cardiac sudden deaths.
They would represent brain hemorrhages and other things as well. Is it something everybody should do, do you think, before a certain age? Well, I wouldn't be involved if I didn't believe in it, so I believe in screening. I think you have to do it appropriately, though, and not over-screen and certainly not under-screen. There's a sweet spot in every programme.
And I suppose important to know your family history and that might be a factor whether you should put yourself forward for screening.
Well, absolutely. Let's say your father had a heart attack at 45 and he wasn't a smoker. The first thing you should do is get your cholesterol checked, make sure your blood pressure is normal, make sure you're not sitting on silent diabetes and take it from there. Know your risk. If your family history is very strong for colon cancer, you should get a colonoscopy. It's as simple as that.
cardiologist Dr Karl Vaughan there and obviously Brian he's very much in favour of screening now back to Ger and to Jamie how's Jamie been getting on?
So we're two years on two years down the road back playing soccer not only that he feels he's more energy now he feels actually he's even fitter than he was before he had this procedure
So yeah, it was probably two weeks on the couch, just doing nothing after the procedure. And then after that, I slowly started getting back into sport and going out with my friends and things like that. And then in the moment, I didn't really realize it, but like looking back, there was a big uptick in like,
my physical performance and like physical endurance and things like that that I didn't really notice at the time but it's because of the procedure and you know getting that fixed that I noticed those things and that those things happened.
It's obviously focused his heart's work and it's allowed him to not just get back to the level that he was at he's actually surpassed that and he's moved up the divisions in soccer and he's still doing really well now to this day so yeah
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Chapter 4: What was the diagnosis Jamie received after the screening?
But if you do it, like Jamie said, there's no bad outcomes. You either, you're absolutely fine and you forget about it, or there is something that is well worth addressing and it can be addressed in a very straightforward way and you move on better and brighter than before. So that's why we decided to kind of do this.
That's Ger and Jamie Moran speaking to Brian O'Connell. Thanks for that, Brian. That's great news that Jamie's been sorted out and that that time bomb, as his father described it, has been diffused. So good news all round.