Pulsara Blog

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, hearts are everywhere—heart decorations, heart candies, heart cards, even heart pancakes for the more creative sweethearts. But one of the most important hearts of all too often gets overlooked: Your heart (or your heart health, to be specific)! 

February is American Heart Month: a national event to raise awareness about heart disease and what you can do to decrease your risks. Heart disease is the #1 cause of death for Americans, killing over 650,000 people annually. It is responsible for 1 in 4 deaths in the U.S. each year, and one person dies every 36 seconds from cardiovascular disease (that's heart disease and stroke combined). And that's not just for older adults; heart disease is becoming more and more common in young adults, making it important to learn whether you might be at risk.

As the world buckled under the weight of COVID-19, emergency protocols were put in place to protect as many people as possible from exposure to the virus. Many of these protocols successfully achieved what they were designed to do. However, there were also many ways in which we didn’t yet fully understand the impacts of our pandemic response protocols.

Australian EMS agency Ambulance Victoria has recently released new research on the specific causes behind one such unintended consequence: increased deaths from sudden cardiac arrest.