Last week I had the opportunity of shadowing my PI, Dr.
Rahul Deo, in the clinic to observe how he interacts with his patients, and the
type of concerns his patients bring to him. Yesterday we had a female patient
in her mid-sixties. She came to UCSF clinic seeking answers concerning her
cardiovascular state. Her older brother passed away a couple months after being
diagnoses with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy causes thickening
of the heart muscle linings making difficult for the heart to pump blood as
easily. In turn, making the heart significantly weaker. It turned out that most
of her family has died from heart failure and a majority of them being from
hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Not knowing whether her relatives died from
inheriting a heart disease or simply due to age and higher blood pressure. Dr.
Deo has to gather genetic testings’ her relatives have done in Canada before
being able to tell whether this patient has also inherited a mutation for heart
failure. After meeting with the patient Dr. Deo showed me an ultra sound of the
patients’ hearts and pointed out to me the different chambers of the heart and
also showed me some thickening of the patient’s atrium, but he figured the
thickening could have been due to high blood pressure and age. He also showed me an EKG which is a electrocardiogram
of the patient and showed that there were no obvious reason that would validate
the patient of having a mutation. This was really interesting to me because not
only have I been able to work in the lab, but I also got to see how Dr. Deo
interacts with patients, and how patients like that influence future questions
and concerns in the world of cardiology.
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