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Michael Bloomberg Releases More Health Details and Asks Same of Bernie Sanders

(Bloomberg) -- Michael Bloomberg, who has sparred with Bernie Sanders on their health, released details of a recent cardiac exam and challenged the Vermont senator, who had a heart attack last year, to do the same.

Bloomberg, 78, specifically called on Sanders, also 78, to release his “left ventricular ejection fraction,” or the amount of blood his heart pumps with each contraction. It is a key piece of data cardiologists would use to assess his health. Bloomberg’s doctor said his rate of 60-65% was “normal.”

“Releasing this single scientific number about heart health could start to put to rest any concerns about Senator Sanders’s secrecy about his recent heart attack,” Bloomberg campaign spokesman Stu Loeser said in a statement. “Mike Bloomberg’s doctor shared Mike’s number, will Senator Sanders ask his doctor to do the same?”

(Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)

Sanders’s communications director Mike Casca rejected the call and said “the letters that we’ve released are very thorough.”

Sanders left the campaign trail in October after having two stents inserted to treat a blocked artery. He was diagnosed with a myocardial infarction, his doctors said in a statement on Oct. 4. He released letters from his doctors in December saying he was fit to lead the country.

Bloomberg’s campaign released a letter dated Wednesday from Stephen Sisson, his internist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, saying his annual health examination and cardiac stress testing last July showed normal results with “excellent exercise capacity.” An electrocardiogram “showed atrial fibrillation, but was otherwise unremarkable,” the letter said.

Bloomberg underwent a stent placement for a blocked coronary artery in 2000 but heart function is normal, the letter said. “He has not had a myocardial infarction, and cardiac stress testing has shown no evidence of damage to his heart,” Sisson said in the letter.

The rival campaigns have sparred recently on the issue of the candidates’ health, with Bloomberg campaign manager Keven Sheekey accusing the Sanders campaign of “spreading an absolute lie” that the former New York mayor had suffered heart attacks.

Sanders’s press secretary Briahna Joy Gray said in a Feb. 19 interview on CNN that the Vermont senator’s health is being scrutinized but “none of the same concern is being demonstrated for Michael Bloomberg, who is the same age as Bernie Sanders, who has suffered heart attacks in the past.” She later said on Twitter she had misspoken, “when I said Bloomberg had a heart attack” but stressed that the former New York mayor had undergone the same procedure as Sanders.Bloomberg released a letter in December from Sisson saying he is in “outstanding health” and that he underwent coronary stent placement for a blocked coronary artery in 2000 with normal annual cardiac stress testing since then.

To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Niquette in Columbus at mniquette@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Magan Crane

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