Scared Safe From Heart Disease
Some kids in Alexandria, Virginia, recently learned that it's never too early to start taking care of your heart. This is the second part of a CBS News This Morning series, "Heartscore 99," that looks at the fight against heart disease and what the future holds.
Students from T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, file into the hospital lobby and are quickly escorted to a place that is known as "the dome." After a little introduction, they gather around to see something they have never seen before.
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At Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, a 42-year-old man is about to have open heart surgery to fix two blocked arteries. The students will watch from the dome, just a few feet away. Nurse Linda Lewis-Sims tells the group, "Right now they're waiting for us to make the incision. OK, let's go in."
For three hours, Linda Lewis-Sims answers their questions, such as, "Where are they going to get that vein from, the leg?" Her response is that, yes, they're going to take the vein from the leg.
For a graphic view, there are television monitors for close-ups as she teaches them about heart disease.
The dome started out as a way to teach medical students, but it's now open to the public. It's being used as a way to deliver a strong dose of preventive medicine, especially to the young.
In the words of one student, "I was scared because this is the first time in my life to see something like this and I wish this is not going to happen to me."
Dr. Edward Lefrak, Inova's chief of cardiac surgery, sees the dome as a way for kids to make the link between their lifestyle choices now and their health down the road. "Seeing this in a book or on television, it's completely different when one sees it in real life," he says.
Heart disease evolves over many years. Doctors now know that it starts in childhood, and that it's never too early to begin preventing it.
"I think we should start in childhood, once kids are over two years of age," says Dr. Tom Starc, of New York Presbyterian Hospital. "I think that's time to start implementing low-fat, low-cholesterol diets."
Starc worries about the effects poor diet and lack of exercise are having on America's kids. "If we can intervene early in children we might be able to put off heart disease or maybe avoid it completely," he says.
For 16-year-old Monique Lyons, seeing the surgery reinforces a lesson she's learned at home. Heart disease runs in her family.
Monique's mother, Kimberly, remembers when her father got sick. "e had a massive heart attack and it was pretty scary," she says. "For years after that, even today, his lifestyle changed a lot. He wasn't able to build houses anymore, bowl with the city league, and things like that."
It was the family's first introduction to heart disease. She continues, "My parents are from the South, so we cooked a lot of fried foods and pork and there was a lot of salt and things like that and we stopped eating those things," she says.
Monique Lyons is healthy now, and she's determined to keep it that way. She encourages the whole family to make the changes they need to so that no one else has a heart attack.
"I want to see my mother when I'm in my 30s," she says, "so I do want her to stay healthy so she'll be there for me."
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