Posted 5/29/2008

BRUIT? YOU MAY HAVE IT.

You go to your doctor's office for your annual physical exam and emerge, smiling, with a clean bill of health.

But something bothers you.

You keep hearing about people who get good results on their exams, only to be felled by a heart attack or stroke the next day.

Are you foolish to worry?

No, you should worry.

Especially if you doctor didn't exam you for bruit.

Bruit? What is it?

Bruit is the French word for noise. A noise that sounds like turbulent water rushing over rapids.

Bruit was discovered years ago by nurses listening to carotid arteries with stethoscopes. Many times, the nurses reported hearing a strange noise. But doctors ignored them because the noise was intermittent.

Then some alert doctors and health scientists conducted research that linked bruit to strokes. Still not much was done about it.

But now a study conducted by the Walter Reed Army Medical Center shows that people with bruit are twice as likely to suffer heart attacks or die of cardiovascular disease.

The carotid artery is the river which brings blood to your head. If the artery is healthy, the blood moves smoothly and quietly, like the river in the movie African Queen.

But when fatty materials build up in your carotid artery, you blood flow becomes irregular and more rapid as it moves over the fatty obstructions. Then your carotid artery can sound like the river in African Queen when Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn drove their thirty-foot boat over the rapids.

The early detection of bruit can save your life by getting you into preventative treatments.

If your doctor hasn't read this research, print out this article and take it to him. On second thought, make a second copy and give it to his nurse. She is more likely to do something about it.

After all, it was nurses who alerted the world to the phenomenon of bruit in the first place.

In any event, just make sure you get a stethoscope on your carotid artery soon.

(click here for a printable version of this article)