The Aging Athlete: PVCs on an Apple Watch (Episode 10)

Originally a blog entitled, "The Aging Athlete: PVCs on an Apple Watch (Episode 10)"

I’m getting older, which is the “aging” part of the title. In addition, my family has a history of heart disease, so I wanted to start getting proactive about my ticker. This began a journey that begins with a new Apple Watch for Christmas and a discovery that rocked my world. In addition, let’s dive into the newly emerging world of smart device health monitoring and how that could eventually save many lives.

My Family Heart History and Smart Health Devices

I drew my heart genes from a very bad deck of cards. My dad had cardiac bypass surgery in his 60s and his father perished from a sudden death heart attack. On my mother’s side of the family are many heart stents and then, oh, by the way, her dad also perished from another sudden-death heart attack in his 60s. I guess the good news is that I did hear from a friend in medical school that he had a worse cardiac history. All of the men in his family had died in their 40s and 50s from a heart attack.

So what’s the good news about my bad genes? We’re entering a brave new world of constant health monitoring that will change everything. In the next 20 years, we’ll see a range of devices that exist in the background of our lives that are always looking for small problems while...

Published by Centeno-Schultz Clinic
Read by Chris Centeno, MD