Speaker: Sudden cardiac arrest, that isn't a heart attack, what's the difference?
Andrew D. Blaufox: Well I think when people typically think about a heart attack, they are usually thinking in their minds someone has had a myocardial infarction where the blood supply to the heart itself is somehow compromised and that is a disease, more of older age where people build up plaques and blockages of their coronary arteries. In young people coronary artery diseases are much less uncommon. In fact it's fairly rare but children and young adults do die suddenly from cardiac arrest, and the vast majority of these cases and electrical in nature and because by a variety of problems such as Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, the Long QT syndrome, Brugada Syndrome or patients may have different types of Cardiomyopathy, a Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy or a Dialytic Cardiomyopathy and all these patients are susceptible to dangerous or malignant Arrhythmias.
Speaker: Many times we don't even have any indication in occurring with symptoms before. So maybe a good idea for kids going to school and playing game like a football game or gym athletics, function they have some automatic defibrillators around, it wouldn't be a bad idea.
Andrew D. Blaufox: Yeah I think that's probably a good idea to have these around, the New York state has programs for AEDs or Automatic External Defibrillators in school and there is funding available for that across the state.
Speaker: Are these very expensive?
Andrew D. Blaufox: Home Defibrillators you can get for about a $1000 upwards to $3000. So for school system it seems to be very reasonable. I think that for each community they have to look at a couple of different things, one is the cost of the equipment and training people and the availability of this equipment in the sports facilities compared to whether or not they want to just apply first responder with the equipment. So if you are going to have police and fireman have these equipment in their car and they have good response time then you may not need it at every field or every event as long as you have people who know how to use it and can get it there within a few minutes.
Speaker: We always looking that a school system should have an emergency plan including things like that are possible or in our case you mentioned they have a quick responding team maybe in the school there was a first aid station found, so that will be a pretty good subject. But the idea is if you prepare for the problem, eventually you probably would never get the problem.
Andrew D. Blaufox: Absolutely and it's imperative that you not only draw up a plan but to have figure out the testing of the plan and make sure if it is the school that teachers and the health personnel are all aware of where the equipment is located and who to call and what steps to take in order to get the responders there in an immediate crisis. The other thing is also the health department should also track patients who maybe at higher risk, patients who have previous heart disease and know where they are and what activities they are engaging and perhaps make the trainers or the coaches aware that there maybe an issue and that they need to be highly suspicious if these patients are complaining of symptoms.
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