CINCINNATI — A college athletic trainer helping students turned into the one who needed help after a diagnosis impacting his heart, but now he's using what happened to him as an example for student-athletes both on and off the court. 

What You Need To Know

  • UC Athletics chief of staff Brad Pike has been helping student athletes stay healthy for decades before he found out he had his own heart problem

  • Doctors did a procedure to correct the problem but Pike didn't see results until there was a change in diet and exercise 

  • Pike is now using what happened to him as an example to students to stay healthy 

Brad Pike knows basketball.

“I used to used to be an athlete, now I'm just trying to keep up," said Pike. 

He played basketball long enough that he knew how to help players train for it. He became an athletic trainer and physical therapist.

“Athletics is a very high-paced job. And so, you just have to put things to the side and I guess things were happening way before," said Pike. 

What he didn’t know was happening was his own health problem. It was one he couldn’t see but could feel. 

“One day I had to meet my supervisor for a donor meeting at a coffee shop and I said, well, I'll just walk there. And I was having shortness of breath walking there, and there weren't any hills or anything so I thought that was weird," said Pike. 

After multiple tests, he found out he had a dangerous heart problem. 

"I didn't really have a reaction. I was the type of person then that I just brushed it aside," said Pike. 

But doctors found it was a heart problem they couldn’t push aside.

“We found that he was having an irregularity of the heart rhythm known as atrial flutter, it's fairly common, it's related to atrial fibrillation, which is the most common irregularity of the heart in adults in the United States," said UC Health Cardiologist Dr. Richard Becker. 

It's something Dr. Becker says can lead to heart failure if left untreated, so they took action. He says they first did a procedure to remove the heart’s abnormality then tried something more natural. 

“We know of medications that we can use, but we also recognize that there are non-medical ways to address it," said Becker. 

A change in diet and exercise is what Pike says might have just saved him. 

“I had a lot of unnecessary oils in my diet, I had too much dairy in my diet, I had too much kind of inflammatory foods that I  have an inflammatory process going on in my heart," said Pike. 

Now, as the chief of staff at UC Athletics, he’s using what happened to him as an example to student-athletes both on and off the court. 

“So many people need to understand that you can change your health by changing your diet and what you consume them and the things that you're exposing yourself to…just that can make a huge change in your life," said Pike.