This is unfortunately the truth for many people. People will present as their first symptom, having had no prior symptoms with death.

Welcome to the Fat Emperor podcast. I'm your host, Ivor Cummins. We're supported by the Irish Heart Disease Awareness Charity, which advocates a simple CT scan to reveal your CAC score. So know your

score and take action to prevent that premature heart attack. Everything you need to know will be right here.

Dr. Paddy Barrett, cardiologist, great to have you here. Really great to be here. Thanks for taking

the time. Not at all. Delighted. And it's great to have you here really great to be here thanks for taking the time not at

all delighted and it's great to have you in studio as well i do a lot of remote podcast but this is the

real deal yeah as someone who records stuff the in-person stuff really kind of a makes a difference

yeah for sure so you know what i was going to start with which i often do do, is just a little bit of your background. So you went from medicine into cardiology. I know you have extensive experience in the USA, probably seen as the center of excellence for this field. So maybe just give a little bit of your background and how you got to where you are today. Yeah. So I did my medical school training in UCD, then went on to spend a year in Australia

in cardiothoracic surgery, looking to make a difference from that point of view.

Quickly realized that I wanted to work in cardiology as opposed to cardiothoracics, then transitioned.

Spent about five years in the United States, predominantly

at the Scripps Translational Science Institute, which is really this institute that is looking

to pull together a whole lot of different technologies and work with different industry leaders

to really kind of translate basic science into kind of clinical science, but also spent a year in New York

at the Columbia University Medical Center doing interventional cardiology. So opening arteries

with stents and everything that goes with that. And that was, I think, an unbelievable experience

for me, but also an eye-opener in so far as looking at where you're

addressing a disease state on that continuum. And what people do in interventional cardiology

is absolutely phenomenal. But for me, it was, I think, a little bit too late. And in terms of

where we are meeting people on the cath lab table, we've missed people

by about 20 years. So I decided to move my focus and attention to a slightly earlier time point

in the disease date. Right. So you essentially went towards preventative. Excellent. And you came back

...