Free heart screenings for teens find silent, possibly deadly problems
University of North Texas cheerleader Skyler Sanders, 21, was a junior at Hays High School when doctors discovered that she had a hole in her heart: an atrial septal defect, officially.
She had started having heart palpitations in middle school. She would get short of breath and feel like she needed to sit down. At first, she was having one episode every six months; by high school, she was having about one a month. “They were very random,” Sanders says.
Sometimes palpitations would happen in cheerleading practice, but sometimes they happened when she wasn’t exercising.
She thought she was having anxiety, but her primary care doctor directed her to a cardiologist as soon as she mentioned the shortness of breath.
The cardiologist did an echocardiogram and ultrasound and saw the hole. The defect was enlarging her heart slightly, she says. She also had a leaky mitral valve.
Doctors told her that it wasn’t something she had to fix right away, she says, but she needed to get it fixed before she turned 24 because that would be when problems would start arising. If left untreated, it could have caused a stroke or congestive heart failure.
Sanders decided to have surgery in May 2017 and was back cheering again two months later. Doctors were able to minimize scarring and shorten recovery time by making incisions in between her ribs instead of cracking her chest open.
Sanders’ heart problem is one of the problems that doctors can detect through screening. On Saturday, Heart Hospital of Austin will offer free screenings for teens ages 14 to 18. During the screening, technicians will do an echocardiogram and an EKG to look for heart defects such as atrial and ventricular septal defects and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy — that’s the one you sometimes hear about in seemingly healthy athletes. It can lead to a dangerous arrhythmia and sudden cardiac death.
The screenings are a great resource to the community, says Dr. Faraz Kerendi, surgical director of the Heart Valve Clinic at Heart Hospital of Austin and cardiothoracic surgeon at Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgeons. “It allows young student-athletes, young students in general, to find conditions that may otherwise be totally asymptomatic that could be life-threatening. This allows them to get an echocardiogram, and an EKG, basically at no cost to them, to detect things that could otherwise show up in a bad way.”
The Heart Hospital does screenings two times a year, typically