Chelmsford Police Adds Lifesaving Wellness Program For Officers

CHELMSFORD, MA — Seeking ways to better care for his officers, Lieutenant Gary Hannigan of the Chelmsford Police Department reached out to Sigma, which creates wellness initiatives within law enforcement, about its Tactical Wellness Program—resulting in a partnership Sigma founder and CEO Dr. Ben Stone calls “a match made in heaven.”

The program is a comprehensive cardiac screening program designed to detect early onset heart disease, plaque development in young officers to retirees, “and everything else in between,” Stone explained in an interview with Patch.

The screening’s components include a carotid ultrasound looking for the presence of soft plaque, a lipid panel, cholesterol size and quality, and cardiac inflammatory biomarkers.

“It’s probably the most complex physical you're gonna get this side of a hospital,” according to Stone. “We’ve diagnosed everything from Hashimoto thyroiditis all the way to myeloproliferative diseases, cancer, and heart disease.”

Though the National Institutes of Health says adults ages 65 and older are more likely than younger people to face heart trouble, cardiovascular disease is found in everyone, Stone explained, adding that he’s seen young, fit-looking men and women die from heart disease after they had just been given a clean bill of health.

Often these people are screened using traditional risk markers, which according to Stone, are dated—having been used for the last 50 years in clinical health care—and are intended to assess the risk of heart disease in civilian populations, not police officers and firefighters, who are exposed to additional risk factors. These risk factors, according to Stone, include sleep irregularities, stress injury, PTSD, and coping mechanisms like tobacco and alcohol.

In the decade pre-COVID-19, heart attack was the fourth leading cause of line-of-duty deaths behind 9/11-related cancer, gunshot wounds, and automobile-related deaths, according to Tactical and Law Enforcement Medicine.

According to a 2014 study from Harvard School of Public Health and Cambridge Health Alliance, police officers in the United States face roughly 30 to 70 times higher risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD) when they’re involved in stressful situations—suspect restraints, altercations, or chases—than when they’re involved in routine or non-emergency activities.

“It’s this caustic amalgam of circumstances that are baked into the cake of law enforcement,” Stone said. “When you take a civilian that has a predisposition to heart disease, and you put 'em behind the badge, it's like pouring water on a grease fire.”

Delays in diagnoses often result when programs only screen older officers for heart disease, according to Stone. Meanwhile, he explains, the average age of the first heart attack in police officers has dropped from 49 to 46 over the past 5 years, and the average age of a heart attack for a police officer five years ago was 49 years old—16 years younger than that of civilians.

“Thirty-some odd percent of these officers that are told they're at low to intermediate risk according to these traditional risk models, but they actually have elevated cardiac inflammatory markers which alert us that the conditions for plaque development are there,” Stone explained. “And so they're walking around thinking, 'I'm totally fine.' And then they have a heart attack. And that's when I got involved. Because that’s unacceptable.”

At agencies utilizing Sigma, officers can sign up for screenings at will, Stone explained. The department will cover at least part of the screening, which will result in a one-time bill of $799 per officer. In some cases, workers' compensation, local grants, or ARPA funds help, he said.

If abnormalities are found during the screening, Sigma will help officers work with primary care doctors, specialists, and/or dieticians to get the necessary treatment, Stone explained.

Prevention is key, Stone emphasized, which is why his goal is to find younger populations of officers that have the early stages of plaque development and intervenes so they “never go the way of some of these older command-level officers that have been doing this job for 30 years.”

“That's why everything that we do, every piece of advice that we give and every statistic we collect is based on uniform personnel,” Stone added. “We’re working with a special group of people that are subject to a special group of conditions that need a special approach. And that's what Sigma is.”