Bob Harper Exercised and Ate Right. How Did He Have a Heart Attack at 51?

His cholesterol tests came back fine, except the one his doctors didn’t run.

Former Biggest Loser trainer Bob Harper ate clean, never smoked, and was a personal trainer to the stars. Ben Stiller, Ellen DeGeneres, and Jennifer Jason Leigh all worked out under his direction. He's not someone anyone would expect to have a heart attack at 51.

One day he fainted at the gym. But like we all do, Harper explained it away -- he was working too hard, not drinking enough water, not sleeping enough. Over the following few weeks he started getting dizzy spells, and he tried to ignore them too because, to be fair, he was one of the fittest human beings he knew. Finally, the dizzy spells got so bad that he went to the doctor, who looked at his lean, obviously healthy patient and reached for the easy answer: “You probably just have vertigo. You can take something for that.”

Harper was never fully comfortable with the vertigo diagnosis. He knew something was up. On the Friday before his heart attack, he told a friend that the dizzy spells were not vertigo, and that he was going to see a specialist the following week. He didn’t get the chance.

That Sunday, February 12, 2017, while working out, he collapsed in full cardiac arrest. It was the “widowmaker,” a blockage that shuts down the artery feeding the front of the heart. A doctor who was working out at the gym began CPR while someone else called 911. Harper spent two days in a medically induced coma and eight in the hospital.

How does the fittest guy in the room end up in the hospital at 51?

The answer was hiding in his family health history and in an inherited blood marker that too few doctors test for. Harper's mother died of a heart attack at 70, and so did her father. So on his mother's side, two people died the same way at the same age. A doctor who knew that pattern, looking at a fit 51-year-old who faints and then can't shake weeks of dizzy spells, has reason to check the heart before reaching for vertigo. But Harper's doctor didn't have the pattern in front of him.

If the doctor had access to a thorough family history, he might have looked beyond the standard cholesterol panel (LDL, HDL, and triglycerides), and ordered a lipoprotein(a) or Lp(a) test. It’s possible to have great cholesterol numbers and at the same time carry dangerously high Lp(a). About one in five people have high Lp(a), yet fewer than one in 400 have ever been tested. Bob Harper was one of the unlucky ones.

Harper now tells anyone who will listen to ask their doctor for the Lp(a) test by name, because the clean cholesterol numbers he trusted were never measuring the thing that nearly killed him.

Collecting Family Health History Is Not Easy

In 2004 the Surgeon General deemed Thanksgiving “National Family Health History Day” every year to encourage families to discuss and record their medical histories. The Surgeon General later collaborated with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on this initiative because understanding your family’s health history can help both individuals and healthcare providers identify risks for conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. Understanding those risks means earlier interventions and screenings.

But who writes it down, where is it saved, who validates it, and how is it shared with your doctor? The problem is that the history is scattered and soon to be forgotten. An aunt remembers when Grandpa had a heart attack because she was there. Perhaps a grandson was in the hospital waiting room when they found out Grandma had stage IV brain cancer.

But how does the rest of the family get this information before it gets watered down to “I think Grandma died of cancer, but I’m not sure what kind”? And that data is certainly not in the room when you go to your doctor complaining of severe headaches that get worse when you lie down. This is when the family health history could be life-changing.

HealthScout Family Health History

The Family Health History feature of HealthScout is now available. It’s designed so you and your whole family can contribute to and benefit from your entire family’s history. With HealthScout’s Family Health History, everyone in the family can add or correct the history to the benefit of everyone else.