Key points from today’s guests:

Aubree Bell, receiving treatment for familial hypercholesterolemia

• Ten-year-old Aubree is receiving therapy for a very rare condition with her blood.
• At age two and half, she was diagnosed with familial hypercholesterolemia – a disorder that makes her bad cholesterol sky high.
• She had orange blisters on her skin and the local doctors in South Dakota thought it was a bathing issue.
• It was actually the cholesterol seeping out of Aubree’s skin.
• Every 14 days, Aubree and her family drive more than 8 hours from South Dakota to the health system for treatment, which filters the bad cholesterol out of her blood and puts the cleaned version back into her body.

Dr. Stephen Lauer, pediatrician, The University of Kansas Health System

• Now some groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology say that all kids need a cholesterol test around the age of nine.
• We're trying to understand the family history of all of our patients because that's one of the most predictive things about how they're going to do so.
• If there are specific elements of a family's history that are important and known to cause health problems in that family, then your child's pediatrician needs to know about it.
• Healthy diets, avoiding excess calories, and good exercise regimen is recommended for children even at an early age.

Dr. Patrick Moriarty, director, Atherosclerosis and Lipid Apheresis Center, The University of Kansas Health System

• We're developing a trial using CRISPR and patients with high cholesterol.
• If high cholesterol is left untreated, it can lead to long-term development of atherosclerosis, which is the abnormal deposit of so called bad cholesterol within your arteries and eventually could progress into symptomatic heart attack or stroke.
• It is important for the schools to have good sports programs, because if they're physically active as a young child, as they get to be in adulthood, those habits can persist.
• If you have physically active lifestyle throughout your life, that's a very strong determinant in preventing atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Kenn Goertz, pediatric cardiologist, The University of Kansas Health System

• As a pediatric cardiologist, one of our goals is to try to prevent disease.
• Most of the children I see are older children and unfortunately their problems with lipids are commingled with obesity and metabolic problems, pre-diabetes or sometimes even type two diabetes, which has additive or multiplying effects on cardiovascular risk.
• Getting outside to play becomes a challenge sometimes because some of the families do not live in safe neighborhoods. And so how do we as a society assist and enable people to do what we advise them to do?
• The reality is that the first line therapy for high cholesterol levels or abnormal lipids, with some very unusual exceptions, is to encourage a healthy diet and more exercise.

Tuesday, Aug. 6 at 8 a.m. is the next Morning Medical Update. As a firefighter, Jason is used to saving lives. But when he was diagnosed with cancer on his tongue, he was in for the fight of his life. You’ll see the amazing story of the measures doctors took to save his life.

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