[robbiep]

The most common cause of sudden cardiac death is blocked left anterior descending artery.

Generally this is unknown until it happens.

It kills 250,000 Americans every year.

It would make the most sense for people above 50 with a family history of heart disease to have a CT coronary angiogram or for those above 40 to have a Cardiac Calcium Score to risk stratify for future CTCA.

Distributing AEDs is infrastructure heavy and indiscriminate because you don’t know who actually needs one.

[tomatocracy]

In the UK, in addition to what the sibling comment mentioned about phone boxes, a lot of workplaces now have AEDs on site (eg I know mine does) and they're also common at large-scale events. I don't know if there are any statistics on how much good they've done but that seems like quite a sensible approach to me as you can presumably get quite a lot of population coverage quite cheaply.

By contrast, a CT coronary angiogram I suspect is rather more resource heavy - in particular I suspect having enough qualified cardiologists to interpret the results (not just having CT machines and staff to administer the test) might be a bottleneck (anecdotal, but having had one myself due to family history of heart disease, I had a longer wait for results after the scan than to get the scan itself).

[robbiep]

It’s risk stratification vs preventative care. You don’t WANT someone to have a heart attack and require the AED, because you’ve only got a 5-20% chance of making it out of hospital.

These things are not équivalant!!!

Risk stratification for AEDs at work and public events, whereas screening should increasingly be part of the plan particularly if you have a family history (defined as 1 or more relatives who died younger than 65 from a heart attack)

CTCA doesn’t require a cardiologist, just a radiologist, but a cardiologist referral makes it free (in australia) otherwise it’s $500. Which is pretty good really

[gerdesj]

Quite a lot of people/families can find £500-1000 for something important. The more that can, the cheaper it will become.

AEDs/Defibs are just an expensive battery powered thing, that we just don't bother to discuss. With around an hour or less training, you can expect to be at least 10x more effective than the best CPR. CPR is horrible to deploy and very complicated but I will if I have no choice.

[robbiep]

They’re not equivalent though! An AED means your heart muscle has been absolutely trashed and will never be the same again. Plus, there’s still the issue of who actually needs an AED in their house, and if you know that, they’ve probably got an IED.

Whereas if you can for the same cost have a scan after being reviewed appropriately, you can avoid the heart muscle trashing. That is nothing short of a miracle in terms of the extension of lifespan available

[Aeglaecia]

can you provide sources for AED trashing the heart muscle ?

[sacnoradhq]

There's a cardiologist dark joke about this.

We should be sending ~10 million more patients to the cath lab prophylactically to get a baseline.

[moffkalast]

Well as long as it only kills Americans, then the simple solution is to emigrate /s