This is a transcript of a Dr. Jay Show broadcast on 1560TheGame in Houston, TX. Dr. J. Michael Bennett is a Board Certified Orthopedic Surgeon and a Fellowship Trained Sports Medicine Physician serving patients from Katy, Fort Bend County, Metro Houston and Southeast Texas from offices in Richmond and Sugar Land, TX. Dr Bennett is will begin to see patients at a new office in Houston on May 3, 2012. Call 281-633-8600 for an appointment.
Our special guest today is Dr. Terence Chang, a family practice physician Board Certified in Sports Medicine from Physicians at Sugar Creek in Sugar Land, TX. Bob Lewis, from 1560TheGame, is also participating.
Here’s the transcript of the second portion of the Show:
And we’re back, Saturdays with Dr. Jay, coming at you live, I want to give a shout out to Texas Sports Medicine Institute for actually sponsoring us here, it’s a great facility
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| Histopathological image of dissecting aneurysm of thoracic aorta in a patient without evidence of Marfan syndrome. The damaged aorta was surgically removed and replaced by artificial vessel. Victoria blue & HE stain. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
located between Katy and Sugar Land, go check it out: www.texassportsmed.com Like I said, they’ve got a multi-specialty facility over there with orthopedic surgeons, sports medicine specialists, and of course, your favorite, Danny Arnold, is out there as well with his Plex 99 location, which is adjacent to the facility.
So we’re talking about deadly conditions in sports medicine, now we’re kind of in the middle of the physical exam part of this and I really wanted to talk to you guys about making sure that when the parents are filling out these information sheets they’re doing their due diligence and getting that family history and the symptoms down. The reason the family history and the exam are important, particularly the family history, is that a lot of patients that we see we can really weed them out as far as who’s at risk for developing these heart issues and who might have genetic predispositions. Genetics play a role and if you have a history of someone in your family having some sort of problem with their heart you can actually pass that down to the younger ones and one thing is something called Marfan syndrome which is actually these patients come in and they have long fingers and they’re tall and they really have lax joints which looks great for their potential as a basketball player. But at the same time they could be at risk for having a heart defect. Dr. Chang, the heart defect I’m talking about with Marfans, can you gointo a little bit of detail on that, what you’d be looking for?
CHANG: Basically with Marfans, you have a genetic condition where the soft tissue is very lax. And it’s not just the joints, it’s also all tissues, including the blood vessels. When the aorta, which is the largest blood vessels to come out of the heart, is really lax, under high pressure it can actually tear. And so that’s some of the things that we look for. Does this person have a murmur? Does this person have an early indication that they have something wrong with the aorta, with the aortic valve, that it can cause a problem once they start doing exercise? Because once you start to exercise, your heart rate increases, your blood pressure starts to increase, and it puts a lot of stress on that portion of the blood vessel, on the aorta. And it does pose a risk to the patient.
BENNETT: And that’s key. That’s one of those things that if you tear your aorta, you drop dead. I mean that’s it. You get a rip in the aorta and you bleed out and you fall over dead. Some of these guys that you see that are playing these sports and have fallen dead on the court, it could have been a heart abnormality, it could have been an
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| Micrograph demonstrating thickening of the spongiosa layer (blue) in myxomatous degeneration of the aortic valve. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
abnormal rhythm in the heart, where all of a sudden the heart skips a beat or beats too much or comes out of rhythm and they fall over and die because the heart goes into a shaking kind of a state and it stops pumping blood or they tear their aorta where they bleed. These are things that can be evaluated beforehand and sometimes you can’t pick them up, but sometimes it was just one of those things that was either missed or they fell through the cracks, or they didn’t see the right physicians or what have you. Or the doctors didn’t pick them up at that time. But that’s why you’ve got to communicate with your physician on your family history, and that’s why you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got a doctor there that’s listened to hearts and knows what a heart rhythm sounds like and knows what a murmur sounds like.
Please call our office if you’d like to schedule an appointment with Dr. Bennett. Our phone number is 281-633-8600 and we have offices in Richmond and Sugar Land with a new Houston office opening May 3, 2012.
