District 87 will offer heart defect screenings at Glenbard East High
Some area doctors are teaming up with Glenbard High School District 87 to detect serious heart issues.
The school board is eyeing the Midwest Heart Specialists' Young Hearts for Life program for Glenbard East High School students this fall, and possibly other schools in subsequent years.
A similar program was piloted last year at Butler Junior High School in Oak Brook. Physician J.C. Marek and some partners at Midwest Heart Foundation gave free cardiac screenings to students as a way to prevent young people from dying of heart failure and to raise awareness of the issue.
Since then, nearly 10,000 students at Downers Grove Community High School District 99 and Naperville Unit District 203 have undergone the brief EKG screening. The foundation hopes the program will catch on at other schools throughout the area.
"It's a wonderful opportunity for our community and our parents," board member Steve Sebby said.
"Each week, six young adults in the United States suffer sudden cardiac death, usually during intense physical activity," Marek said.
In the first six months of this year alone, two Chicago area high school students died after collapsing, he noted.
A condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is the leading cause, accounting for about 35 percent of such deaths, he said. The condition is present in about one in every 500 individuals and the condition is detected by an abnormal EKG in more than 90 percent of them, he said.
An EKG can detect other conditions that cause sudden cardiac death as well, he added.
Twenty-five years of EKG screenings in Italy has shown that early detection can reduce the percent of deaths due to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy from 34 percent to less than 3 percent, Marek said.
Marek added that the test will not detect every individual at risk of sudden death.
"It will not make them immortal," he said.
If the program is approved, roughly 100 trained volunteers solicited from the community would come into the school and test all students over two days. The short test would be done during the student's physical education class.
The results will be sent to parents so they can follow up with their regular doctor. All volunteers sign a confidentiality agreement, he assured.
Marek warned that the test does result in false positives about 2 percent of the time. But he and other doctors believe that the anxiety of further testing is far better than the possible tragic outcome if a potentially fatal problem goes undetected.
The volunteers, coupled with Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove and others underwriting the program, enable the screenings to be free for students.