Hi, my name is Dr. Warrick Bishop. And you might be aware I'm the author of Know Your Real Risk of Heart Attack. My hope is to try and stop people dying from cardiovascular events, but we can't prevent people still needing some therapies.

My family history of heart disease probably goes back many generations on my father's side, my grandfather died of heart problems and my father had a heart bypass when he was in his early sixties when Tasmanians had to travel to Adelaide for the operation. My younger brother had a heart attack at the age of fifty-two.

Hi, my name is Dr. Warrick Bishop and I'm the author of Know Your Real Risk of Heart Attack. The thrust of this book is to try and prevent people having problems. In fact, it's to try and stop people dying, but people may still need a stent, and so today's question for you if you'd like to engage below is, do you know what a stent is?

Join our free and highly engaged Facebook community to discuss Heart Health From Prevention to Cure and Everything in Between! Doctor Warrick regularly interacts with the members and does monthly live Q&A sessions.

As with the monthly healthy heart network live shows, what I try to do is cover a patient case, or a patient story. I try to share a bit of education, and I try to answer a patient question that I've had recently, which I hope that you will find intersting, and hope that it will relate to you. So today, the patient story is about a man who is young and had a heart attack.

People often wonder what a stent is. Well, a stent is the term that we use for the structure, which is really a cage that we use to open up arteries. Now, way back when I was a cardiology registrar, just starting off in the game, we had these fantastic clot busting medicines. So, when people came into hospital with a heart attack, a blocked artery, we could give them these clot busters. And we could break up the clot that had formed on a ruptured, plaque and start to reestablish blood flow. Well, that clot would often form on a tightly narrowed area.

I'm hoping to cover some questions that are coming from the group. I'm looking to share with you a little bit of teaching and some stuff to think about. And I'm also going to share with you a patient case that just popped up this week. So tonight, I'd like to start off by talking about fats and the role of fats in coronary artery disease, which is really common and people constantly ask me about, "what should I eat, doc and gee, if I've got coronary disease, should I cut down fat or should I increase fat? And what if I'm Keot or what if I'm not? And what if my carbs are down and is olive oil good or avocados good? And so forth.

Today, the topics are going to be around do statins reduce blockages in arteries, how do we know how tight arteries are and when do we fix up blocked arteries? I've also got one case which I'll chat about at the end, but let me get going. I would like to start off by sharing with you two questions that came through a number of weeks ago when I asked for any specific questions. So Susan Bauer asked, "at what percentage blockage should a stent be placed?" And she also asked, "if you're on statins, will the blockage get better, stay the same, or possibly get worse?" I'm going to actually take that as the first question, cause it's a really important one. And then I'll come back to percentage of blockage.

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Well-known Australian cardiologist Dr. Warrick Bishop has crossed the globe to deliver a powerful TED Talk about the perfect storm that is costing lives and how it can be stopped.