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Happy Mother’s Day! It’s been a day of mixed emotions – I made a lovely (even if I do say so myself) slow cooked beef brisket roast for my wife, her sister and my mother in law, so 3 mums in total, but also it’s another reminder my mum is in a dementia care home, […]

I had a reminder this weekend that recovery matters more as we get older. On Saturday I played golf with my son and realised afterwards that I’d done something I almost never do: I’d barely drunk anything all day, and certainly hadn’t had any electrolytes. After finishing the round, I put the clubs in the […]

It’s been a very busy week on call — made more challenging by getting over a cold. Like buses, I hadn’t had one for years and then two arrived in quick succession. The most irritating feature of this latest one was the nocturnal cough. It reached the point where I was (quite rightly) banished to […]

Quick answer: Not straightforwardly — mandatory ECG screening only works well in the handful of countries (Italy, Israel) with the national infrastructure and specialist expertise to interpret teenage athlete ECGs correctly. Without that, false positives are common and can cause real harm — unnecessary scans, sport exclusion, psychological stress — and better CPR training plus […]

As regular readers will know, I often base my blogs on real-world cases I’ve seen during the preceding week. And this week provided a couple of particularly interesting examples. It’s very common in clinic for patients to be nervous about taking a statin. These drugs are among the most widely prescribed and most extensively studied […]

Once a year, usually in early February when the calendar is otherwise fairly bare, ten of us get together. We’re all men, all old friends, and for many of us this weekend is the only time we see each other all year. Twelve months can pass without so much as a coffee, yet within minutes […]

Quick answer: A man in his early 30s was found to have severely elevated, long-standing blood pressure causing organ damage — a reminder that high blood pressure isn’t just an older person’s problem. Know your numbers at any age, and don’t dismiss a high reading as “just stress” without following it up. As regular readers […]

I’ve been rather irritated this week. I’m so used to having such good health, that it’s really noticeable when I’m not well. I can’t recall a day off with a common cold in 25 years (although was incredibly sick with covid on a couple of occasions unable to leave the bed for days on end […]

Often in my weekly blogs I discuss a certain topic, research trial or medical news item, but having spent the whole of this past week on-call, I thought it might be interesting to simply give you an insight into what it looks like ‘on the front-line’ of acute heart care in my hospital.  On-call weeks […]

Quick answer: A major new study found that people typically regain lost weight within 1.5–2 years of stopping GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy or Mounjaro — four times faster than after lifestyle-only weight loss. The medications are genuinely effective, but lasting results come from building sustainable habits (especially resistance training) alongside them, not from the drug […]

I hope you had a good New Year, whatever you got up to. Mine was fairly quiet, partly because I was on call the following day — which, as it turned out, was busier than expected. That said, I’ve actually had a pretty good run over the festive period work-wise, so in truth it’s going […]

Well here we are at the end of another year, where has the time gone? If you celebrate Christmas I hope you had a good one. We hosted my Dad and my wife’s family, and whilst I had wondered if it would be emotional as the first Christmas without my Mum, plus the recent passing […]

Oddly although I’ve been in the snow for a week it has not seemed that Christmassy, but now back at home with the decorations up and presents to wrap the vibe has suddenly changed. I had a fantastic time away with my family skiing. We were lucky with the weather, plenty of sunny days and […]

I’m sat here writing this in Southampton airport on Saturday at 07:00 but will schedule it to go out at the usual time tomorrow. The reason? It is so foggy that our inbound airplane has diverted to Gatwick… I may be here a while! On the plus side, I’m off to the Alps skiing which […]

Quick answer: A polygenic risk score is a saliva-based genetic test (£950) that estimates your lifelong inherited risk of coronary artery disease, distinct from a standard cholesterol test or familial hypercholesterolaemia testing. It’s most useful if you have a family history of heart disease, borderline cholesterol, or want a more personalised approach to prevention — […]

Firstly I want to thank everyone who has written in with their condolences following the tragic unexpected death of my wife’s father from a heart attack last week, it really is very much appreciated. It has been a difficult time for all of us, but like many families faced with an unexpected loss, it has […]

I wrote recently that my wife had had her cholesterol measured for the first time in too long, and we were somewhat surprised to find that it was on the high side, despite a healthy diet and exercise. I think often when people get medical test results back, particularly in middle age (my wife is […]

It’s been a fortnight of education for me. The week before last I was asked to give a talk at the British Geriatric Society annual meeting in Nottingham about frailty in heart failure, and then last week I was in London for the British Society for Heart Failure, and gave a talk on new medical […]

Today I’ve been ‘acting down’ to cover the registrar rota for the strikes. All OK so far, I’m just hoping not to get called out too much tonight! Over the last month I have written about what in my view have been the biggest advances in heart health in the last 10 years. This has […]

Quick answer: Cardiac amyloidosis was once considered rare and untreatable — it’s now detected far more often, and for the first time we have licensed treatments that can slow it. Atrial fibrillation ablation has also moved on hugely with newer, safer pulsed-field techniques, and wearable devices are transforming how early rhythm problems get picked up. […]

Over the last few weeks I have been summarising the biggest cardiac innovations of the last decade, having just reached that milestone as a consultant in Bournemouth.  When I was a registrar in London at the Heart Hospital, I recall in around 2012 they appointed a consultant in ‘structural intervention’. The Heart Hospital (University College […]

Quick answer: Heart failure care has been transformed over the last decade. Two new drug classes — SGLT2 inhibitors and ARNI — have joined the ‘four pillars’ of treatment, and many patients with severely weakened hearts can now see their heart function return to near-normal on scans, reversing what used to be considered an irreversible, […]

My intention had been to continue my blog series on the biggest innovations in heart health over the last decade today, but I must push that to next week. The reason? I’ve been on call all this week and it has been rather extraordinary, such that I feel I must write on that instead. I […]

To mark my 10th anniversary as a consultant cardiologist in Bournemouth, I am writing a blog series on what I regard as the most important developments in heart health over the last decade. It’s rare in our frantic modern lives that we stop to reflect, but it’s only in doing so that we realise quite […]