SVMC cardiology

 

 

STRIVING TO IMPROVE YOUR LIFE ONE BEAT AT A TIME

You get one life and you get one heart. The board-certified cardiologists and associated practitioners at SVMC Cardiology are committed to helping you make the most of both.

Our patient-centered approach to care and personalized care plans maximize your quality of life while delivering the treatment you need when you need it.

Creating the appropriate treatment plan for your condition begins with a cardiac consultation. Your consultation is a chance for you to share your health history and current concerns with your cardiologist. All necessary exams and tests are conducted on-site by your cardiac care team. The results are shared and discussed directly with you so that you fully understand your condition, treatment options, associated risks, and potential lifestyle changes.

After a heart episode or surgery, there’s nothing our cardiac team and you want more than for you to just get back on your feet and live the life you want. That’s why we begin your rehabilitation program before you even leave the hospital. Through a combination of education and exercise, your personalized program will help you build strength and reduce your risk factors. Using the full range of cardio equipment in our Cardiac Rehab Center and under the watchful eye of our rehab team, you’ll improve your heart’s strength and capacity and get closer to resuming a full and active lifestyle. For more information about Cardiac Rehabilitation, click here.

In order to understand how well your heart is or isn’t functioning, an echocardiogram may be performed. This non-invasive procedure uses sound waves to produce images of your heart. Both of SVMC’s cardiologists are board certified in echocardiography and able to observe how your heart is pumping and identify any abnormalities in the heart muscle or valves. An echocardiogram allows our team to make the most informed and appropriate recommendations for the next steps in your care.

If a standard echocardiogram does not provide a clear image of your heart, your SVMC care team may recommend a transesophageal echocardiogram or TEE. Performed at the hospital, this procedure involves inserting a flexible tube containing a transducer down your throat and into your esophagus. From this closer vantage point, the transducer then uses sound waves to create more detailed images of your heart and allows for better diagnosis.

Before we treat your heart, we need understand how it’s performing. At SVMC we offer a number of non-invasive stress tests that can quickly and easily reveal a number of things including: how well your heart works during increasing levels of activity; how certain medications are impacting blood flow; the effectiveness of procedures done to improve heart performance; and more.

If you have risk factors for heart disease, calcium scoring may may help you learn more about whether you are actually at risk. The non-invasive test uses high-speed CT imaging technology to measure the hardening of the heart’s arteries, a leading indicator of heart disease and heart attacks. Visit the calcium scoring page for complete details. 

A pacemaker is one of the most effective ways to ensure a heart maintains a steady, healthy beat. The SVMC cardiac team is exceptionally skilled and experienced at both pacemaker implantation and monitoring. Considered a minor surgery, implantation takes place at the hospital with most patients returning to normal activity (and a more steadily beating heart) within a few days. Like all medical equipment, pacemakers need a little TLC every now and then. At SVMC our cardiac team can perform routine monitoring, both remotely and in the office, and reprogramming as needed.

One of the most common cardiac diagnostic tools, an EKG is a painless way to check for problems with the electrical activity of your heart. The EKG translates and records your heart’s electrical activity over a period of time and translates it into waves. Your SVMC care provider can use printouts of the waves to detect any patterns that might point to a specific condition and put together a treatment plan that meets your specific needs.

Should your SVMC cardiac care provider want to monitor your heart over a longer period of time than is practical for a standard EKG, you may be given a Holter or event monitor. Worn outside the body and completely painless, monitors are helpful in detecting abnormalities that only happen occasionally and can help your doctor link any abnormalities to specific activities or events in your day.

Carotid ultrasound
At SVMC our goal is to treat your health issues before they become problems. Using our sophisticated carotid ultrasound test, your cardiac care provider can detect blockages in your neck arteries that could lead to a stroke or indicate problems in other parts or your circulatory system.

Education
Because understanding what causes heart problems is essential to resolving them, we offer a variety of educational resources to patients and their families.  Workshops are offered on an ongoing basis throughout the Dartmouth-Hitchcock network, and condition-specific literature is available in our offices. 

SVMC Cardiac Rehab

SVMC Pulmonology

American Heart Association 

Go Red for Women 

American College of Cardiology 

140 Hospital Drive, Suite 211, Bennington, VT 05201
Phone: (802) 442-0800
Fax: (833) 343-1597

Hours:
Monday – Friday:  8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Directions: 
For directions to SVMC Cardiology, click here. 

Parking:
For appointments at SVMC Cardiology, park in parking area P3 or P5.

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    Kids’ Vaccination News
    Anonym
    / Categories: WELLNESS, 2021

    Kids’ Vaccination News

    Here in Vermont, we are making headway on vaccinations much more quickly than we could have predicted. In fact, the age band for those 55 and older is expected to open in as little as 5 weeks! This prompts many to wonder, when will a vaccine be available for children?

    As you may know, the Pfizer vaccine is approved for those 16 and older while the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are for people 18 and older. While there are similarities between adult and pediatric immune systems there are also differences, so vaccine trials need to be completed on children younger than 16 before the vaccines can be approved in that age group.

    Clinical trials are already occurring for younger age groups across the country and beyond. Pfizer and Moderna have clinical trials for children 12 to 15 that are ongoing. They expect to release data over the summer. It is reasonable to expect that children 12 and up may be eligible for vaccination shortly after data is released, assuming the trials demonstrate appropriate safety and immune response. That means that high-schoolers could be vaccinated before returning to school in the fall of this year!

    A vaccine for those ages 5 to 11 will require another round of trials, which are expected to start later this year and results expected in the last quarter of 2021. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said that those under the age of 12 are very likely to be vaccinated by the beginning of 2022!

    We know that children aren’t generally at risk of serious cases of COVID-19, but it is a possibility and so it is still important to vaccinate children. Here are some other reasons to vaccinate your kids:

    • Reaching herd immunity through vaccination is our greatest hope to remain safe while being able to discontinue the restrictions we have lived with for the last year. Herd immunity requires that about 70 percent of the population be vaccinated. A quarter of the U.S. population is under 18 years old. Given that some adults will opt out of vaccination, we need children to get vaccinated in order to reach that minimum level of protection necessary to keep circulation of the virus down.
    • While kids don’t usually become very ill with COVID-19, they can spread COVID-19 to the adults in their lives. Vaccinating kids will decrease the amount of viral replication in their bodies and decrease the likelihood of spread to the more vulnerable people who live or work with them.
    • There are still some complications and long-term effects of COVID-19 that we don’t entirely understand. Rarely, those who have COVID-19 infection can later develop a condition called “multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children” or MIS-C. Some other reports have noted very rare instances of heart or other complications among older kids exposed to COVID-19.
    • Illness isn’t the only way kids are suffering during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many kids who have not become ill are enduring upheaval in their daily lives, isolation, and increased stressors. Disruptions to education have impacted academic progress while lack of sports and other extracurriculars have impacted kid’s mental health. Getting both kids and adults vaccinated is the only way to decrease spread and return to our normal way of life.
    • COVID-19 is dangerous, and the vaccines against the virus are safe. They have already demonstrated an excellent safety profile while greatly minimizing hospitalizations and deaths, which are the ultimate goals. By the time the vaccines are made available to kids, they will have been tested on millions of adults and tens of thousands of children, which will be a very good indication of their safety. Meanwhile, COVID-19 has killed 500,000 people, including at least 172 children in the U.S. alone and has greatly impacted everyone’s lives in negative ways.

    I was vaccinated as soon as the vaccine was made available to me, and I intend to have my own children vaccinated as soon as the vaccine becomes available to them. If most of us get vaccinated and continue to follow public health guidelines, we can hopefully look forward to a much more normal 2022 and beyond!

    Meghan Gunn, MD, is the chair of Pediatrics at Southwestern Vermont Medical Center in Bennington, VT. 

     

     

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    Tags: children vaccine COVID-19

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