Celebrate National Heart Health Month With KCHS

February is National Heart Health Month. Kearney County Health Services can help area residents with their heart health from prevention to detection to in- tervention to rehab.

Heart health begins with prevention and detection. Regular exercise, proper diet, taking medications as pre- scribed, and avoiding risky behaviors like smoking are important factors in preventing all diseases including heart disease. Regular visits with your healthcare pro- vider are also vital. For those with a family history of cardiovascular disease it is especially important to keep up regular well visits and to share information with your healthcare provider so they can help with early detection.

If a patient has an irregular heartbeat, blood pres- sure issues, heart murmurs, difficulty breathing, chest pain, or other symptoms of cardiac issues, a provider may order cardiac sonography to help determine the cause. KCHS has recently added cardiac sonography to the available services within its walls.

“We recently added the service of in-house echocar- diograms (also known as echo’s) and have brought on have an echo tech, Ryan Hawthorne, who is available on a part-time basis. that comes in and does exams for us currently; his name is Ryan. He Ryan has over 10 years experience in adult and pediatric echo and vascular ul- trasounds,” KCHS Radiology Tech lab tech AllisonAllyson Sinsel said. “I can am able to perform do vascular ultra- sounds as well and I am learning currently training to perform echo’s, we just don’t so we will have someone here full-time that knows echoes so he comes once a week to do to provide those exams for us.”

Check February 15 edition of Courier for full story.