Every year, about 2,000 people under the age of 25 die from sudden cardiac arrest in the U.S., but a free screening program that travels to Chicago-area high schools is hoping to prevent these tragic deaths.
Advocate Health Care partners with Young Hearts for Life to offer the free screenings for students age 12 to 24.
The program recently visited West Aurora High School where staff and volunteers hoped to perform electrocardiograms on 2,600 students in one day.
“This is absolutely free. We're not taking the kids out of their regular day. It's all done during their PE class,” said Meghan Hill, a physical education teacher at West Aurora High School.
With music playing and balloons filling the school’s gyms and fieldhouse, the screening event looks like a party, but this is personal for Hill, who lost her cousin 20 years ago.
“She was going on stage to dance at Waubonsie High School and she was backstage and she passed out and she never came back from that,” Hill said.
Hill’s cousin, Kathryn Bender, is the reason she helps organize the screenings.
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“She passed away from Long QT syndrome, which is one of the heart conditions that these EKGs test for,” Hill said.
The electrocardiograms are administered by trained volunteers and then read by cardiologists, including Dr. Frank Zimmerman, a pediatric cardiologist at Advocate Children’s Hospital and the medical director of the Young Hearts For Life program.
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“All they're doing is recording electrical activity. It's not delivering any electricity to the heart or anything like that. So it's completely painless. It takes about 10 seconds,” Zimmerman said, showing the equipment needed to perform the screening.
Ten seconds hooked up to several leads, attached with stickers – that’s all it takes to detect potentially life-saving conditions.
“The most common condition that affects like athletes that have sudden cardiac arrest, is called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and it's an abnormal thickening of the heart muscle,” Zimmerman said.
The Young Hearts For Life program travels to a different high school each week during the school year. Nine more screening events are scheduled before classes end this spring and the program is already scheduling visits for the 2024-2025 school year. For more information, click here.
“I encourage every high school to do it,” Hill said.
Parental consent is required. Families should know abnormal results don’t automatically disqualify students from playing sports.
“What we're learning is that it's safe to participate in sports as long as you do it with certain precautions. So we want kids to participate safely. And that's why we think that detection is so important,” Zimmerman said.
“This is something that even if we only find one kid with an undiagnosed heart condition, it is worth it. It's worth it to this community and to enable our families to not have to go through what my family went through,” Hill said.
