How the Heart Operates A Guide to Understanding Heart Disease
In order to understand what heart disease is, someone needs to know how the heart
works. The heart is a muscular organ that works as a blood pump. It has the size of someone’s fist and is located in the center on the left side of the chest. The heart can be divided into two
different sides right and left. This prevents oxygen-rich blood from mixing with the deoxygenated blood. The oxygen-poor blood will return to the heart after circulating through out
the body (Mayo, 2013).
Heart failure is when someone’s heart can’t pump enough blood, it doesn’t mean your heart stops pumping, but it can’t perform at the level your body needs too. There’s another name for heart failure, which is Congestive heart failure. The arteries in the heart narrow up to an extent that it leaves the heart too weak or stiff to pump efficiently. Because of this blood cannot longer circulate. When the heart is starting to weaken, fluids will start to build up causing congestion in the lungs also other tissues (Ferguson, 2013). Also the right side of the heart gathers the blood that is returning to the body and sends it to the lungs, if the right side of the heart is failing the blood breaks up into the vines and there are no signs of edema. The left side the heart receives the blood from the lungs and pumps it out into the body. If the left side of the heart fails the blood is not pumped effectively.
The heart needs oxygen to live just like all the other muscles and tissues we have, a few minutes of not having any supply oxygen the heart tissue begins to die. “However is not that often where is not a lifetime of worsening traffic, congestion in your arteries stemming form coronary heart disease that kills you although CHD is an alarming condition in to own right”. Here’s an example of how this works, imagine that you cut yourself, the platelets that are in your bloodstream will rush to the cut and hold it together until its hard. The platelets will help
someone from bleeding to death; this is same process that happens when someone is suffering
from a heart attack. The prices of plaque gets knocked around the bloodstream and raptures, the fasting-acting platelets will come to the area where it’s needed and from a clot in a matter of minutes. When someone is having a heart attack it doesn’t get ignored from the rest of your body, what happens is the nervous system freaks out when it realizes what is going on, the body goes into the fight-fight mode.
Our body depends on a strong pumping heart to circulate life-giving blood, and this includes the heart muscle itself. If the coronary arteries become blocked the cardiac muscle begins to fail and the circulation decrease, which includes the circulation to the heart muscle itself. A major risk factor in having high blood cholesterol for heart disease and strokes is by someone lowering their cholesterol. Lowering your cholesterol can help reduce the risk of having heart disease. Someone with high blood cholesterol can lead to buildup of plague in the artery walls, narrowing your arteries is a condition called atherosclerosis. This can make it’s harder for blood to flow though the heart and body putting someone at risk of circulatory problems (“How does cholesterol,” 2012).
Heart disease is talked about in different types of diseases that affect the heart. Atherosclerosis is a specific form of arteriosclerosis thickening & hardening of arterial walls, that affects the intima of a large and medium size muscular arteries and is characterized by the presence of the fivrofatty plaques or atheroma’s. The most common affected by arteries by atherosclerosis are large and medium sized arteries which include: aorta, contrary, popliteal and cerebral arteries. There are some major complications resulting from ischemia due to atherosclerosis including myocardial infarction leading to heart attacks and cerebral infarction leading to strokes. Some of the fewer complication is peripheral, vascular disease, aneurysmal
dilatation due to weaken arterial walls, chronic heart disease, and ischemic encephalopathy and
mesenteric occlusion.
In the western industrialized nations atherosclerosis have caused more than half of all
deaths. Incidence progressively increases in developing nations to an epidemic proportion over the last few years, due fast changing lifestyles. The death rates of myocardial infraction are 20- 25% and are mostly related to underlying atherosclerosis. Cardiovascular diseases are related to atherosclerotic coronary and ischemic heart disease, the both of them are the most common causes of death in the developed countries of the world. Cardiomyopathy is a group of heart muscle discords in which the ventricles are enlarge but are not able to pump enough blood for the body’s needs, and it can lead to heat failure. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is a heart disorders where the walls of the ventricles thicken and become stiff, even though the workload of the heart is not increased. The restrictive cardiomyopathy is the group of heart disorders in which the walls of the ventricles become stiff, but not thickened, and resist normal filling with blood
between heartbeats.
There are several different types of strokes, which are hemorrhagic and ischemic, but one of the most basic understanding of a stroke, is that it interferes with the brain’s supply of blood. When the brain doesn’t get the necessary blood supply it will start to shut down and lose it function. Lost of to much blood causes someone to have a stroke, the way the brain gets blood is through various blood vessels, the brain is usually 2% of the body mass and generally uses about 20% of the body oxygen. In our hearts we have four chambers and several different entrances, which are superior, vena cava, and inferior vena cava then exits the aorta.
In the last 30-40 years, an advance in cardiology has greatly decreased the rate of CVD. The result of the population-wide has made much progress in preventing CVD, also finding ways
to treating patients with the disease. Dietary, smoking habits, treatments for hypertension and dyslipemia have been outpatient therapy for CVD also the inpatient treatments have improved sufficiently. However, In the United States there are same areas where research on CVD has not been successful. There are same ways a person can lower their risk in having CVD which is having a healthy diet and nutrition which include: eating fruit’s and vegetables on a regular basis and maintain a variety of grain products in your diet. Patients should eat 2 gms or less of saturated fats, maintain the right amount of calories that are eaten, and keep a balance exercise that fits with the number of calories you eat. Here are some other ones that someone can fellow to help prevent CVD.
-
Watch the amount of calories that you eat.
- Try to avoid foods that are high in saturated fat, trans fat and high in cholesterol.
-
Don’t eat anymore than 6 gms of salt a day.
I choose to talk about heart disease because when I was younger I had to two family members that died from it. Neither one of them listened to the doctor’s or took their
medication. My grandfather had a stroke and was paralyzed from the left side of this body and later had a heart attack and died. My uncle on the other hand just didn’t care enough to listen to anyone, being young when this happened I have always wanted to find out more information on heart disease, heart attacks and strokes. This class has tough me stuff that I have never even heard of. Such as I never know that are heart has four chambers and the right side and left side of our heart does different things.