Life by the Numbers: A Personal FH Journey

What is the impact of early diagnosis and appropriate treatment on disease management and longevity for individuals with familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) over the course of 45 years?

I answered this and many other questions in this research letter titled “Life by the Numbers: Living with Familial Hypercholesterolemia” for the Circulation: Genomics and Precision Medicine, a journal of The American Heart Association.

“Life by the Numbers” may be a play on words, but it’s also characterized my own life since I was young: cholesterol levels, age of family members at death, how long it’s been since they died. All bittersweet.

Yet some numbers—how much longer I’ve lived than my parents and brother did, how many more years my daughter and her daughter will live without heart events—are cause for celebration.

Thank you for taking the time to read and learn more about this common, vastly under-diagnosed disorder that runs in families. Finding a physician who will #KnowFH and #FindFH is key to making our own numbers positive ones. I would also like to thank Dr Joshua Knowles and the Family Heart Foundation for giving me this opportunity.

Casey Mulligan Walsh is a writer and former speech-language pathologist who lives with her husband, Kevin, also an Family Heart Foundation advocate for awareness, in West Sand Lake, New York. She enjoys combining her love of language and years of grist for the memoir mill to write about life at the intersection of grief and joy. Her work has appeared in the Under Review, Barren Magazine, Brevity Blog, ModernLoss, TheFHFoundation.org, and Adoptive Families Magazine, among others, and is upcoming in Fresh.Ink. Casey can be found at www.caseymulliganwalsh.com. She is currently querying a memoir, The Full Catastrophe: A Love Story.