Cardiologist Explains Why Heart Diseases are Happening Earlier

And looking at your sort of journey, what has got you into cardiology in the first place?

I loved it as a student.

And so in some ways, being a cardiologist is almost like a default in medical practice.

Certainly when I was at medical school, training was anchored in being a hospital physician.

If you looked at what you were being trained for, The training looked like the training overall to be a hospital physician, and then you might split off to be a surgeon or a GP or an anaesthetist or whatever.

And cardiology was really at the core of that.

And if you think about acute presentations to hospital, 30% to 40% have some cardiology components.

So it really is the biggest thread of acute presentations in acute medical emergencies and so on.

I enjoyed it at university.

I really liked the cardiologists and the way they thought and they practiced.

One of my mentors was Professor Peter Weisberg in Cambridge.

So I remember saying to him as a student, I think I want to do cardiology.

And so that's the lab that I ended up going back to do my PhD in.

So that's what that connection was.

But interestingly, as a student, you see the patients, you look at ECGs, look at plans.

The stuff that I do as a specialist now, as an interventional cardiologist, was pretty much experimental in the early 90s when I was training.

And so even as I came through and decided to do cardiology as a specialist trainee...

it really wasn't that mainstream.

So I was fortunate in that as the technology and the equipment and the specialty and the data evolved, that's the specialty that I'd chosen.

So I began training at a time when the equipment was getting better, absolutely, and the numbers were increasing, yeah.

It sounds super interesting because, I mean, unfortunately we've had family history with cardiology with my son, and so learning a little bit about that.

But it is an amazing system.

It is so intricate.

It's a little bit like what plumbing that goes in needs to be sort of plumbed out.

And yeah, the interventions that you guys are doing now is quite remarkable.

And looking at your sort of journey, what has got you into cardiology in the first place?

I loved it as a student.

And so in some ways, being a cardiologist is almost like a default in medical practice.

Certainly when I was at medical school, training was anchored in being a hospital physician.

If you looked at what you were being trained for, The training looked like the training overall to be a hospital physician, and then you might split off to be a surgeon or a GP or an anaesthetist or whatever.

And cardiology was really at the core of that.

And if you think about acute presentations to hospital, 30% to 40% have some cardiology components.

So it really is the biggest thread of acute presentations in acute medical emergencies and so on.

I enjoyed it at university.

I really liked the cardiologists and the way they thought and they practiced.

One of my mentors was Professor Peter Weisberg in Cambridge.

So I remember saying to him as a student, I think I want to do cardiology.

And so that's the lab that I ended up going back to do my PhD in.

So that's what that connection was.

But interestingly, as a student, you see the patients, you look at ECGs, look at plans.

The stuff that I do as a specialist now, as an interventional cardiologist, was pretty much experimental in the early 90s when I was training.

And so even as I came through and decided to do cardiology as a specialist trainee...

it really wasn't that mainstream.

So I was fortunate in that as the technology and the equipment and the specialty and the data evolved, that's the specialty that I'd chosen.

So I began training at a time when the equipment was getting better, absolutely, and the numbers were increasing, yeah.

It sounds super interesting because, I mean, unfortunately we've had family history with cardiology with my son, and so learning a little bit about that.

But it is an amazing system.

It is so intricate.

It's a little bit like what plumbing that goes in needs to be sort of plumbed out.

And yeah, the interventions that you guys are doing now is quite remarkable.