Until 2004, Darla Varrenti was like any other mother, shuttling her four kids to after-school sporting events and making sure they had the right equipment. Like most parents, she hadn’t given much thought to her children’s heart health … that is, until her son Nick died of a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) on Labor Day.
Nick of Time
A year later, she was on a mission to prevent other parents from having to go through the heartache she and her family suffered following Nick’s death. She does that through the Nick of Time Foundation, an organization that holds heart screenings for high-school-aged kids and aims to build awareness for pediatric heart issues.
“I don’t think enough is being done to make people aware of how important this is,” Varrenti says. “That, for us, is one thing we do—raise awareness. That’s probably the most important part of our mission. And it’s important because people don’t think about their kids’ hearts being checked. They think about picking the right sports equipment or getting on the right team.”
Darla understands this mindset. Nick was the youngest of four children and the others had played sports without raising any red flags. It wasn’t until after Nick died that she began to learn how big an issue SCA is in adolescents and how little is being done to identify and protect children earlier.
"Every three days a young athlete dies," says Varrenti. (For facts and figures about SCA, click here.)
Cutting into that death rate is the goal of Varrenti’s organization and part of a larger movement within the medical community to reduce the number of sudden cardiac arrest cases in the younger demographic. At the heart of that effort is a move to get more children screened with electrocardiograms (ECGs), which could identify potentially catastrophic heart problems before they occur.
Opponents of additional screening maintain that such testing would require massive changes in the medical system, starting with increased education on the part of those trained to read ECGs. Inexperience leads to higher false positives, which then leads to increased follow-up tests and other costs tied to that work.
For Darla Varrenti, early testing is critical, specifically with ECGs.
“There are critics saying widespread screenings are not the way to go about it,” Varrenti says. “For us, we’re not waiting around.”
Helping Others
The Nick of Time Foundation has sponsored screenings that have reached 6,000 kids in the past two years, she says. “Just basing it on a physical is not enough” she explains. “Adding a simple ECG to the mix really makes a big difference.”
In the year following her son's death, Varrenti and her family began wondering what they could do to help others. Over time, they learned SCA wasn't as rare as they thought and figured people needed to know it is a problem.
“This was something I never heard about,” she says.
At first they volunteered with the local American Heart Association, but that wasn’t a perfect fit in terms of the age group of people they wanted to reach. They wanted to target high school students and found inspiration with the group Parent Heart Watch, a nationwide organization promoting awareness about SCA in youth. The group started with 40 families, all of whom had been touched by SCA.
On the ride home from the first event, the Nick of Time Foundation was born.
Now, the Nick of Time Foundation holds about 10 screenings a year, during which they see more than 400 kids at a time. The screenings are held in local fire and EMS stations and incorporate first responders into the process. The events are set up to provide multiple levels of education at different stations. There is a CPR station, as well as an ECG area.
“One of the most important stations at our screenings is the CPR/AED station, where participants learn to recognize the signs and symptoms of SCA and to practice hands-on only CPR,” she says. “That, to us, is a huge part of the program. And we feel like we’re training the next first responders.”
Roughly 2% of the people that are screened at the Nick of Time events are identified as needing a follow-up visit with a doctor, Varrenti says.
“During the very first screening we found a girl with a hole in her heart. As you can imagine, that was an emotional moment,” she says.
By Richard Huff, NREMT-B
See related article here.