From the author
An excerpt from Live Younger Longer
On my 40th birthday, having just gone through extensive cancer treatment, my oncologist told me that the CT scan looking for residual cancer showed a lump in my abdomen requiring further surgery. That was the second cancer in my life and, unlike the first cancer which occurred when I was in medical school and for which I underwent surgery and radiation therapy, this cancer had been treated with surgery and months of chemotherapy.
Fighting this cancer had been the focus of my existence. I had come to appreciate the proverb, "A healthy person has a thousand wishes, a sick person only one." At that point I decided that if I was fortunate enough to re-cover and survive, I needed to do all I could to make sure I never had cancer again. This led me to try to learn things I could do to prevent future cancer and major illness.
At the time I was an invasive cardiologist treating heart attacks and doing coronary angioplasties, which meant that my daily work was on the treating side, not the prevention side, of medicine. Learning how to prevent disease was somewhat new to me. What I learned surprised me. I found out that although I had two prior cancers, heart disease was the most likely future cause of me passing from this earth. I also discovered that six key lifestyle habits lead to heart disease and are also the major causes of other plagues in our current world: cancer, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes and likely many more.
Finally, I had to come to grips with a subject most 40-year-olds don't want to face, which was my eventual and inevitable death. Looking into this further, I found that there are basically four patterns of health, or lack thereof, toward the end of life: sudden death within an hour, rapid death over a few months, long-term frailty before death and organ failure. The latter two usually mean years, if not decades, of illness.
So, six daily habits lead to multiple chronic diseases that result in four patterns of illness during a lifetime. Getting back to the proverb, I realized that if I was fortunate enough to fully recover from this second cancer, I wanted to have the best health that I could, for as long as I could, for the rest of my life. In other words, I wanted to live younger longer. This ultimately led me to the prevention side of medicine, which is what I do now every day. I wrote this book to help others. It summarizes what I have learned about what we can all do to Live Younger Longer.
In good health,
Stephen Kopecky, M.D.
About the Author
Stephen (Steve) Kopecky, M.D., is a cardiologist at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. He specializes in helping people lower their risk of heart disease and of having a heart attack or stroke. He also helps individuals with heart disease reduce their risk of further complications.
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