Your heart needs care for life. A healthy heart is about enjoying a healthy lifestyle and making this a part of your every day life. It is also about taking positive steps to improve or remove risk factors.
Everyone can do something to help prevent heart disease, including people who already have heart disease or who have had a heart event.
The good news is that if you lead a healthy lifestyle you can reduce your risk of developing heart disease.
Heart Attack
A heart attack is an emergency. Getting to hospital quickly can reduce the damage to the heart and increase the chance of survival. A heart attack occurs when there is a sudden, complete blockage of an artery that supplies an area of the heart. As a result, a portion of the heart muscle begins to die. Without early medical treatment, this damage can be permanent.
Know the warning signs of heart attack. These warning signs vary and usually last for at least 10
minutes. You may experience more than one of these:
• Tightness, fullness, pressure, squeezing, heaviness or pain in your chest, shoulders, neck,
arms, back, jaw or throat.
• You may also have difficulty breathing, nausea or vomiting, a cold sweat, a feeling of being
dizzy or light-headed. If you experience these heart attack warning signs, immediately stop what you are doing and rest. If you are with someone, tell them what you are experiencing. If your symptoms are severe, get worse quickly or last for 10 minutes (even if they are mild), this is an emergency. Get help fast. Call triple zero (000) and ask for an ambulance. Don’t hang up. The operator will give you advice before the ambulance arrives. (If calling 000 does not work on your mobile phone, try 112).
Angina
Angina is temporary chest pain or discomfort. It happens because part of the heart is temporarily unable to get enough blood and oxygen to meet its needs, due to a narrowed artery in the heart. Pain or discomfort develops in the chest and can spread into the shoulder, arm or neck. Angina may come on during exercise, but usually goes away with rest, although medication is often required. Angina does not damage the heart muscle so it is not the same as a heart attack. People with angina are more at risk of a heart attack.
Stroke
A stroke occurs when an artery supplying blood to a part of the brain becomes blocked or bursts. This means that part of the brain is damaged because it is suddenly deprived of its blood supply. This blood supply normally carries oxygen and sugar to the brain so that it can function.
Different parts of the brain control different functions of the body, such as movement, speech and sight. Damage to the brain will lead to a loss of the functions that part of the brain controls. Just like a heart attack, a stroke can be mild or severe.
Coronary Heart Disease
Coronary heart disease refers to the failure of the coronary circulation to supply adequate circulation to cardiac muscle and surrounding tissue. Coronary artery disease is a disease of the artery caused by the accumulation of atheromatous plaques within the walls of the arteries that supply the myocardium. Angina pectoris (chest pain) and myocardial infarction (heart attack) are symptoms of and conditions caused by coronary heart disease.
Over 459,000 Americans die of coronary heart disease every year. In the United Kingdom, 101,000 deaths annually are due to coronary heart disease.
Cardiomyopathy
Cardiomyopathy literally means “heart muscle disease” (Myo= muscle, pathy= disease) It is the deterioration of the function of the myocardium (i.e., the actual heart muscle) for any reason. People with cardiomyopathy are often at risk of arrythmia and/or sudden cardiac death.
- Extrinsic cardiomyopathies – cardiomyopathies where the primary pathology is outside the myocardium itself. Most cardiomyopathies are extrinsic, because by far the most common cause of a cardiomyopathy is ischemia.
- Intrinsic cardiomyopathies – weakness in the muscle of the heart that is not due to an identifiable external cause.
- Dilated Cardiomyopathy (DCM) – most common form, and one of the leading indications for heart transplantation. In DCM the heart (especially the left ventricle) is enlarged and the pumping function is diminished.
- Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy(HCM or HOCM) – genetic disorder caused by various mutations in genes encoding sarcomeric proteins. In HCM the heart muscle is thickened, which can obstruct blood flow and prevent the heart from functioning properly.
- Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy (ARVC) – arises from an electrical disturbance of the heart in which heart muscle is replaced by fibrous scar tissue. The right ventricle is generally most affected.
- Restrictive Cardiomyopathy (RCM) – least common cardiomyopathy. The walls of the ventricles are stiff, but may not be thickened, and resist the normal filling of the heart with blood.
- Noncompaction Cardiomyopathy– the left ventricle wall has failed to properly grow from birth and such has a spongy appearance when viewed during an echocardiogram.
Cardiovascular Disease
Cardiovascular disease is any of a number of specific diseases that affect the heart itself and/or the blood vessel system, especially the veins and arteries leading to and from the heart. Research on disease dimorphism suggests that women who suffer with cardiovascular disease usually suffer from forms that affect the blood vessels while men usually suffer from forms that affect the heart muscle itself. Known or associated causes of cardiovascular disease include diabetes mellitus, hypertension, hyperhomocysteinemia and hypercholesterolemia.
Ischaemic Heart Disease
- Another disease of the heart itself, characterized by reduced blood supply to the organs.
Heart Failure
Heart failure, also called congestive heart failure (or CHF), and congestive cardiac failure (CCF), is a condition that can result from any structural or functional cardiac disorder that impairs the ability of th heart to fill with or pump a sufficient amount of blood throughout the body. Therefore leading to the heart and body’s failure.
- Cor Pulmonale, a failure of the right side of the heart.
Valvular Heart Disease
Valvular heart disease is disease process that affects one or more valves of the heart. There are four major heart valve which may be affected by valvular heart disease, including the tricuspid and aortic valves in the right side of the heart, as well as the mitral and aortic valves in the left side of the heart.
Risk Factors
‘Risk factors’ for heart disease are characteristics that increase your chance of developing heart
disease.
These include:
• Smoking;
• A high blood cholesterol;
• Physical inactivity;
• Diabetes;
• High blood pressure;
• Being overweight.
Being male, increasing age and having a family history of early death from heart disease are also risk factors for developing heart disease, but are much more difficult to control or change!
The best ways to reduce the risk of developing heart disease and to help prevent it getting worse if it already exists, are to improve or remove the risk factors over which we have some control, and take all medications as prescribed by the doctor.
