Ted Audio Collective

Hey listeners, this is Ted Health. I'm Dr. Shoshana Ungerlider.

On today's show, cardiologist Nicholas Leeper explores the link between the world's two leading causes of death,

heart disease and cancer. He makes a strong case for breaking down the traditional silos in science

that stop scientists from seeing similar links sooner. And after, I'll share my own recent experience

facing illness and how my father's cancer diagnosis may be saving my life.

In two decades of practicing medicine, I've encountered a wide number of medical diagnoses.

You see, it turns out that there are more than 60,000 different medical diagnoses that you can

list on a patient's chart. You can actually be diagnosed with a burn injury when your water

skis catch on fire. There are also codes if you need surgery after being bitten by a pig,

hit by a spacecraft, stabbed while crocheting, or my favorite due to extreme problems with your

in-laws. But the best of all has got to be the code for getting sucked into a jet engine.

And the reason that I like this one is because this is not the code for the first time this happens,

but for the subsequent encounter. So there must be people on this earth that have been sucked into a jet

engine twice. But I think, you know, kidding aside, we have to recognize that every last one of us

in this room is most likely to die of only one of two diagnoses. And these, of course, are either

cancer or cardiovascular disease. This speaks to the incredible public health importance of these

two diseases, and the urgent unmet medical need to develop new therapies directed against them.

A lot of people are not surprised that these two diseases claim so many lives. After all,

they are very different biologically. They have different risk factors, and they affect very

different patient populations. But for the next 15 minutes or so, I would like to propose a different

hypothesis that perhaps they actually have quite a lot in common. And even more importantly, I would

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