The Problem with the Problem of Heart Disease
Every year, more than 750,000 people will die from heart disease in the United States alone, good for roughly 1 in every 5 deaths or a death every 30 seconds. That's larger than the entire population of Boston. Imagine seven sold-out NFL stadiums, suddenly empty. A moment of silence for each victim would require upwards of 16 months.
Year over year, heart disease remains the most common cause of death among all people, moreso than cancer or viral infections. In fact, heart disease has remained the most common cause of death for over a century now, and a lot of very smart people don't see this trend reversing anytime soon. Heart disease suffers from an awareness problem, where a majority of Americans aren't even aware that heart disease is the #1 killer. And a big part of that is probably people making the all-too-common mistake of thinking they know what heart disease looks like.
Reality is the opposite though. Not everyone who dies of heart disease looks like they even have heart disease. Much of what we now know about heart disease is that it's often a silent killer and that its symptoms often signal the end, not the beginning, of the development of heart disease. So how exactly did we get here?
Today's standard of care was designed to work within the confines of a fee-for-service business model where payors and providers limit themselves to the management of existing chronic disease. On one hand, the underlying processes driving these chronic diseases have often been manifesting for years, decades even. On the other hand, the incentive structures that surround us generally work on the basis of "wait until something breaks before you come and see us". There's no better example of this than what is happening in heartcare today.
Asking a New Question Led Us to a New Answer
For quite some time, heartcare was largely focused on a single essential question: how do we prevent you from dying because of something, like a heart attack, that is happening right now? Then over the past few decades, as scientific advances are slowly made available to the general public, we began to focus on a second, but related, question: how do we implement primary prevention so the things we are treating, like chronic disease, do not get worse?
We believe that the next great innovation in heartcare will come from answering a third, and perhaps final, question: what steps can we take to ensure heart disease never develops in the first place? In order to answer this question, we felt heartcare needed a way to dig deeper to find "a ground truth". Surely, my co-founders and I reasoned, there was a way we could find proof of disease far earlier and far more upstream than what is currently possible with today's techniques and technologies. This wasn't a question for something flashy like AI, but a demand for something brand new.
The problem with a lot of conventional testing is the simple fact that the heart is remarkably resilient. As it turns out, that same resiliency gives the heart the deceptive ability to "hide" the very signs of dysfunction that might act as early indicators of future disease. So how, then, would we find the "invisible signal" we were looking for?
As it turned out, the answer wasn't waiting to be invented but uncovered, and it was hidden in a few 60 year old papers from two scientists at Syracuse University. In 1963, Gerhard Baule and Richard McFee produced the first recording of the heart's magnetic signal, an event that would later come to be recognized as the beginning of the field of magnetocardiography (or MCG).
MCG has a few unique advantages. It doesn't use any radiation. It's almost entirely silent. It doesn't require making contact with the skin. It produces almost no waste. It can produce a reading virtually instantaneously. All of this means MCG is perfect for routine, repeated measurements, no different from stepping onto a scale to measure your weight or standing next to a ruler to measure your height.
Most importantly though, researchers now understand that MCG can produce an undistorted, perfectly clean recording of your heart's electrical activity, undisturbed by the surrounding skin, muscle, and organs which make ECG (perhaps the most widespread cardiac technology today) so remarkly unreliable and difficult to interpret. MCG research, conducted not just by our team but by many other teams of independent scientists across the past six decades, seems to point to a single central idea: the tiny, tiny magnetic field of the heart might just be the best way to "hear" when something in the heart begins to go wrong.
Enable People to Do Something, Do Something Earlier, and Do It Themselves
Our guiding mission with CardioFlux is to give people the power to understand how healthy their hearts really are by taking MCG - which we believe might be the world's most sensitive instrument for recording cardiac function today - and making it available to everyone, everywhere. To do that, we're focused on achieving two major things:
- Enable broad, unlimited access to the power of MCG by combining the latest advanced technology with people-centric design principles to build machines that are widely accessible
- Investigate and validate the use of MCG across the entire spectrum of heart disease, especially for those underserved by current diagnostic pathways, by continuing to invest in rigorous scientific research
We want to see healthcare make the much-needed transition from treating patients to helping people, and we think MCG will play a key role in how we do this for people's hearts.We want people to use MCG and use it often. We want people to measure actual changes in the heart itself, whether expected (due to changes in lifestyle and environment) or unexpected (due to the early development of dysfunction).
Indeed, technologies like MCG might have saved my maternal grandfather, Munshi, who suffered from decades of quiet but constant disease progression and agony. At a young age, I watched him go from good to bad and from bad to worse, all the while being subjected to countless pokes and prods across a never-ending number of hospital stays. His condition got irreversibly worse in his 70s, and although he would go on to live another 15 years, I've always felt that these "years" need to be accompanied with a few air quotes. The honest truth is that while I had been blessed with many extra years with my grandfather, they were hardly the kind of years any of us would want to live. I wish, not that we could have done more for him, but that we could have done things earlier when changes might have made a meaningful difference.
My goal, inspired by my own late grandfather's journey through the healthcare systems of his time, is to give people a way to listen to their own hearts so that more of us can take the very real opportunity to preserve our own heart health. I want to do work for people who will benefit the most from it, and to me, that means finding new ways to prevent diseae by staying vigilant for its signs rather than simply waiting to make the often all-too-late diagnosis.
