Full Transcript Michael Jackson, Stress, and Heart Health 0:00 Michael Jackson's skin was telling the world something for 30 years, but the word wasn't listening. 0:04 I'm Dr. 0:05 Columbus Batiste, interventional cardiologist. 0:07 And when I watched the new Michael movie this past weekend, I didn't see the moonwalk. 0:11 Because what was happening on his skin may have been happening in his arteries. 0:16 Now, by the end of this, You know, the kind you can't see and the kinda your doctor often can measure may be quietly aging your heart right now. 0:27 I wanna show you something. 0:29 Now, when I was a kid, I had one of these. 0:31 Well, not exactly like this. 0:34 Mine was probably a sock, but it was sort of glove-like because I remember sitting in my living room and when Billie Jean came on Motown 25, you could 0:42 ask my oldest sister, she was there. 0:44 She was the witness. 0:45 I got up off the couch, white socks, black church shoes, and moonwalking across the carpet. 0:51 She watched. 0:52 she laughed. 0:53 Nah, I wasn't good. 0:54 But that wasn' t the point. 0:56 The point was, for that moment, i was Michael Jackson. 0:59 I was a superstar. 1:00 For many of us, that was' nt a performance we watched on TV. 1:03 We lived it. 1:04 It was cultural awakening that we lived through. 1:06 the black jacket, the fedora,the white sock, glove, moon walk. 1:11 but here's something most people may have forgotten. 1:13 Long before Motown 25, Michael was already a child star. 1:17 He was performing on stages with Jackson 5 when he was five years old. 1:21 Five. 1:22 And by the time he became the man we watched on Motow 25 he had been performing for the world for almost 20 years.
From Performance Pressure to Artery Damage 1:29 So when I watch the moonwalk now, I don't just see brilliance, although I do see it. 1:34 I see a man who never knew a life without pressure. 1:37 A man whose nervous system had be performing since childhood. 1:40 And as a cardiologist, that matters because how long you've been carrying stress is part of what your arteries remember. 1:47 Let me be clear. 1:48 I'm not here to diagnose Michael Jackson from a distance. 1:59 They're not separate. 2:00 Everything is connected. 2:01 So what does any of this have to do with the white glove? 2:04 Now let me tell you what I see in the cath lab. 2:06 When I look inside someone's arteries, at least during a heart attack, I'm not just seeing a blockage. 2:11 I am seeing the results of years of silent injury, years pressure to perform, to provide, and to be perfect. 2:17 Years of inflammation that was never named. 2:20 and the cholesterol the world wants to blame, it is part of the story, but it's not the whole story. 2:25 So here's a fact most people don't know. 2:27 When researchers have looked at thousands of patients with cardiac imaging, the majority of heart attacks and vascular deaths, 2:33 they happen in arteries that were less than 50% blocked, at least at baseline. 2:38 Let me say that again. 2:39 Most heart attack don's happen the most clogged arteries of 70, 80, 90%. They happen at the inflamed ones. 2:46 So if cholesterol alone isn't the answer, what is? 2:48 Okay, so here's what's actually going on. 2:51 You have to understand what your blood vessels actually are. 2:53 Your endothelium, the thin lining of your vessels, it's alive. 2:58 It covers every blood vessel in your body. 3:00 Every artery, every vein, and capillary.
How Arteries Work and Why Inflammation Matters 3:03 And here is what most people don't understand. 3:05 The endotherium is not wallpaper. 3:07 It's not static, it's active. 3:08 It is actually a pharmacy. 3:10 it produces a molecule called nitric oxide. 3:12 And nitrate oxide, keeps your vessels relaxed. 3:15 Keeps blood flowing smoothly. 3:17 Tells platelets not to clot when they shouldn't. 3:19 Is the molecular signature of a healthy heart. 3:22 I tell my patients all the time, your body is supposed to be making this medicine for itself. 3:27 Now stress is what stops the prescription. 3:29 Here's the thing about stress. 3:31 Chronic stress and inflammation, they reduce nitric oxide. 3:34 And when nitrous oxide drops, Your vessels constrict. 3:37 The lining gets damaged. 3:39 LDL, what you know and heard of as bad cholesterol, it slips in the artery wall. 3:43 Then the immune system shows up. 3:45 Macrophages, your body's cleanup cells, they try to eat the LDl, but they get stuck. 3:49 They turn to foam cells. 3:51 The foam cell pile up, platforms, and the body builds a cap over it. 3:54 Now here's something most people don't know. 3:56 Not all caps are the same. 3:57 A thick, old cap is like a callus, tough, stable, built up over years, improtective. 4:03 Thin, new cap, is a blister, fragile, angry, but still inflamed. 4:08 The artery you should fear is not the one with the thickest callus. 4:11 It's the on with a freshest blister. 4:13 Because if inflammation keeps coming, that blisters cap, it gets thinner. 4:18 And when it ruptures, the body sees an open wound, blood clots, artery closes. 4:22 That's a heart attack, not a slow clog, a sudden rupture of an inflame artery. 4:26 This is why I tell my patients, cholesterol is the culprit, for inflammation, its the accomplice. 4:32 Alright, now let's get back to the superstar Michael Jackson. 4:34 In the early 1980s, he became more than a star. 4:38 He was a global legend, thriller, Motown 25, bad, but this is also the era where changes in the skin were starting to be noticed. 4:46 Patches that didn't match, hands that looked different than the rest of him, and the glove.
The Glove, Vitiligo, and Hidden Illness 4:50 The glove, the world celebrated as style, was not what most of us thought it was. 4:55 Now, years later, actress Cicely Tyson, who was friend of Michael's, she told CNN something most people had never heard. 5:02 She said she shared a fashion designer with Michael in the 1980s and she said, she was there when the glove was being designed. 5:08 She says Michael was beginning to develop vitiligo. 5:11 It started on his hand and the gloves was made to cover it. 5:15 So what looked like fashion was actually medicine. 5:18 What the world called brilliant. 5:19 was also a young man protecting himself from being seen. 5:23 And then there's the rest of the story. 5:25 In 1984 during a Pepsi commercial, pyrotechnics set his hair on fire. 5:29 He suffered serious burns that introduced him to chronic pain. 5:32 But the pain didn't end with the burns. 5:34 For decades, Michael was performing as a dancer at the highest level in the world. 5:38 The footwork, the spins, that drops, The relentless tours. 5:42 the body that performs that hard for that long does not stop hurting when the show ends. 5:47 Chronic pain, chronic stress, inflammation. 5:49 These don't stay separate in a body. 5:51 They feed each other. 5:52 And by 1993 on national television Michael publicly told the World he had vitiligo. 5:57 He said it was a condition he could not control. 6:00 But by then, years of speculation had already happened. 6:03 Here is one of the most important lessons in medicine. 6:05 Sometimes people suffer twice. 6:07 First from the disease, then from misunderstanding of disease. 6:11 We tracked the performance, but we didn't track the physiology. 6:14 So why does a cardiologist care about a skin condition? 6:17 Let me explain. 6:18 Vitligo is, well, it's what we call an autoimmune disease. 6:21 And auto-immune simply means the body's immune system, which is supposed to protect you from outside threats, starts attacking parts of you instead. 6:29 Now in vitligos, the immune systems attacks melanocytes.
Autoimmune Disease and Cardiovascular Risk 6:33 These are the cells that produce pigment, Which is why patches of skin, they lose their color. 6:37 But here's the deeper lesson. 6:39 The immune system doesn't only attack the skin. 6:41 That same immune dysregulation that takes away pigment can quietly create inflammation in other places, including your arteries. 6:49 In 2024, researchers published a study of nearly 100,000 vitiligo patients in the U.S. 6:54 And get this, people with vitilligo had a 28% higher risk of major cardiovascular events. 6:59 a 21% higher risk of stroke, a 27% high risk dangerous blood clots. 7:04 Even after researchers matched patients by age, sex, and other risk factors, what this tells us is this. 7:09 Bitligo Michael disclosed to the world may have placed him in the same category. 7:14 Researchers are now studying in tens of thousands of other people. 7:17 And it lined up with another study that same exact year. 7:20 Researchers in Denmark looked at 85,000 patients undergoing cardiac imaging, people with autoimmune diseases. 7:26 Fideligo was among them. 7:27 They had a 46% higher risk of heart attack, stroke, and cardiovascular death, even after accounting for cholesterol, for blood pressure, 7:34 in accounting of smoking. 7:35 Listen, here's the line that should stop every one of us. 7:39 In that Danish study, even patients with a calcium score of zero, patients whose heart looked clean on imaging, still had nearly double the risk of heart 7:47 event if they had autoimmune disease. 7:49 Why? 7:50 Because the calcium's score doesn't measure inflammation. 7:53 A separate German study of nearly 4,000 patients showed exactly that. 7:56 Even people with the Calcium score zero had a higher risk for heart attack if the had elevated inflammation in their blood, 8:02 measured by a simple test called high-sensitivity C-reactor protein. 8:06 So the autoimmune finding suddenly makes sense. 8:08 A clean scan tells you about calcium, it doesn't tell you inflammation. 8:12 I've had patients sit across from me and ask, but my calcium score was zero doc, how am I here? 8:16 This is how. 8:22 what's happening in the artery wall before calcium ever showed up. 8:25 That's why I keep saying it.
Stress, Daily Life, and What You Can Do 8:27 Genes may load the gun, but the environment, food, stress, inflammation, they pull the trigger. 8:32 that's not just true for vitiligo, that is true of heart disease too. 8:35 So where do you fit in this story? 8:37 I want you to pause for a second, because of course you're not Michael Jackson. 8:40 You're no performing in stadiums, you are not being photographed every day, But think about what he carried. 8:45 A child star at five, a teenager famous around the world, an adult who had to keep reinventing, A new album that had be better than the last one, 8:52 and a new tour that has to be more spectacular. 8:55 A body that was scrutinized every time it appeared in public. 8:58 a man who never had a moment when the World wasn't watching. 9:02 That is the stress of always having to be more. 9:04 Now look at your own life, you may not be on stage, but you are the one everyone calls. 9:08 You're the rock of your family. 9:10 Your the leader at work. 9:11 And you're one taking care of the kids and the ones taking of care your aging parents at the same time. 9:16 you have been performing for years and being the Rock is heavy. 9:20 The pressure to provide, the grief you haven't fully grieved. 9:23 the version of yourself you perform when you even exhausted. 9:27 The conversations you never had because you didn't want to be a burden. 9:30 The strong face you wear at work, at church, and in front of the kids. 9:34 Your arteries? 9:35 They're listening to all of it. 9:36 And here's what most people don't understand. 9:38 You can be sitting at a desk, quietly drinking your coffee, looking calm to the outside world, And your body can still be in fight or flight mode. 9:46 That's not a feeling, that's biology. 9:48 Chronic stress, it activates cortisol. 9:50 Cortisol drives insulin resistance, raises blood pressure, tells your vessels to stay tight when they need to relax, and it lowers nitric oxide, 9:57 the protective medicine we just talked about. 10:00 So here's what I want you to understand. 10:01 Stress, is not just emotional, stress is vascular. 10:05 Every time you swallow your stress instead of speaking it, every time push through instead pausing, your endothelium feels it. 10:11 Your heart feels your arteries, they remember. 10:14 So here's what I want you to do. 10:15 Not next month, not next year, tonight, today. 10:19 Pick one thing, just one. 10:21 Okay, number one, stop the I'm fine reflex. 10:23 When someone asks you how you're doing and you are drowning, Stop saying I am fine. 10:27 Stress that stays secret stays in your cells. 10:30 Tell one person you trust one true thing about what you actually carrying. 10:35 Number two, add one anti-inflammatory food to your plate this week. 10:38 Now I don't want to add all of them, but at least one Leafy greens, berries, walnuts, flaxseed, beans. 10:43 You don't have to be perfect, but you do have begin the process. 10:46 you have get your body moving in the right direction. 10:49 And you give your bodies something to work with. 10:51 Okay, number three, I want you to protect your sleep. 10:54 No phone in bed, no news before sleep, let your nervous system rest. 10:57 Now these are small things, the small thing compound. 11:01 Small things become arteries that age slowly instead of quickly. 11:04 Small thing become a heart that lasts. 11:07 What was hidden beneath the glove may not be different from what's hidden inside of many of us. 11:11 Stress that nobody sees. 11:13 Inflammation that no body is naming. 11:15 A body that has been performing for too long without rest. 11:19 The glove was styled, the gloves was covered, but for all of the us, glove is also a question. 11:24 Where are you covering? 11:25 What is your body trying to tell you that you haven't slowed down enough to hear? 11:28 You don't have to be Michael Jackson to deserve to cared for. 11:32 You dont have be famous for your body to care for something. 11:35 And you don have wait until something breaks to start healing. 11:38 Now if this video meant something to you at all, send it to someone who needs to hear it. 11:42 A son, a sister, friend, colleague. 11:44 The person you love who never slows down. 11:47 Because someone in your life is performing right now while they're hurting. 11:51 They need to know, being the rock is not the same as being well. 11:54 Alright, remember, if you want to go fast, go alone. 11:56 If you wanna go far, together. 11:58 Let's go far together by building healthier hearts and stronger communities. 12:01 So like it, share it send it. 12:03 Save a life.
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