A practical guide to the understanding & prevention of heart disease



Smoking and Heart Disease

Cigarette smoking is a major cause of heart diseases, such as heart attack, stroke, and peripheral vascular disease.

Some Heart Disease Facts Due to Smoking:

- Tobacco contains more then 4,000 chemicals, many are known to be poisonous.

- Nicotine increases blood pressure, because the carbon monoxide makes the heart beat faster and takes the place of oxygen in the blood.

- Tar in tobacco causes cancer, which can be a fatal disease.

- Smoking for long periods of time will cause artery clogging, which in turn leads to heart attacks from overworking the heart by reducing its oxygen supply. It also makes clots more likely to form in the blood vessels increasing the risk of potentially fatal changes in the heart beat.

- Those who are regular, long-time smokers have a 70% greater risk of death from coronary heart disease than non-smokers.

- 80% of new smokers are children and adolescents who are trying to copy a parent or other hero figure.

Passive smoking can cause heart disease, and those who do not smoke directly but inhale smoke from others are at direct risk, as well.

- Living with an active smoker increases one's risk of heart disease by 30%.

- Inhaling smoke is especially dangerous for children and unborn babies (pregnant women) and can lead to low birth weight babies, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), bronchitis, pneumonia, asthma, and middle ear infection.

Stop Smoking to Improve Your Health and Increase Your Life Span

Many choose smoking to cope with stress, loose weight, because of poor self-esteem, or simply to fit in the friend's circle by looking ?cool.? Most of the first time smokers get their first cigarette from someone else or find it readily available in the house from a smoking parent.

Here are some great reasons to stop smoking now:

- Smoking causes heart disease, which can lead to a heart attack.

- Your smoking can cause the same bad effects on your family and friends around you who don't smoke.

- Save money from not buying cigarettes ? if you do the math, depending on how much you smoke, you are looking at couple of thousand dollars a year.

Getting Help

If you think you cannot do it with just plain will power and/or if you are a heavy smoker, get help before you start so you can successfully quit the habit.

- Check with your doctor first and see what course of action he/she recommends.

- Nicotine patch/pills/chewing gums are a great substitute.

- Try to quit along with a friend or a group.

Cigarette smoking can cause you to die early and those who live close to you to inhale the smoke ? that in itself should be reason enough to quit. Enjoy a healthy life and offer clean air to your family and friends ? quit smoking today.

Preventing Heart Disease

Doctor Approved Ways to Prevent Heart Disease

Today's modern medicine has made great strides in determining the causes of heart diseases, as well as ways to treat and prevent it. Just fifty years ago, most people didn't go to the doctor unless they were sick, and the medical profession itself didn't really warn its patients about heart disease, unless the person showed serious signs of it or had a close family member with the disease. Now, thankfully, a much more pro-active approach is taken by both the patient and the doctor in preventing heart disease, as well as treating it.

An Ounce of Prevention

Perhaps one of the best ways to prevent heart disease is to change the patient's outlook on diet and exercise. It has been shown, time and time again, by such medical groups as the American Medical Association and the American Heart Association that a diet low in fat and low in calories is a great way to lower a person's cholesterol, which is a major risk factor when it comes to heart disease. Add to that a regular doctor approved exercise routine and regular monitoring by the family doctor, and you will be an active participant in the battle to prevent heart disease.

One thing to always remember, of course, is that you and your doctor should be a team in the challenge to prevent heart disease. Routine monitoring of such things as your blood pressure, cholesterol level, general weight and health, as well as indications of other diseases that might complicate the situation are all very important things that both you and your chosen medical professional should be on the look out for. So, even if you're not overly concerned about preventing heart disease, see your doctor on a regular basis and talk with them. Depending on what is uncovered, you can possibly get a head start on your race to prevent heart disease.

When Exercise and Diet Aren't Enough

While good diet and regular exercise are great ways to help prevent heart disease, sometimes they simply aren't enough. Occasionally, your doctor will prescribe different medicines, to help with the battle. The most common ones are those that either help regulate and lower high blood pressure or help the body process and lower the concentrations of cholesterol. Whether or not prescription drugs are needed for your situation should be decided after a serious consultation with your doctor and some monitoring of your health and lifestyle. There are many drugs out there to help prevent heart disease, and your doctor can discuss all the options available.

Trying to prevent heart disease is definitely something that should be on the forefront of everyone's mind. It is one of the leading killers of both men and women in the United States today. By working with your doctor, and following a sensible low fat diet and exercise plan, your efforts to prevent heart disease will not be in vain.

Heart Disease treatment

Heart Disease Treatment Options

Heart disease includes plaque-blocked arteries, congenital conditions, arrhythmia, and diseases of the actual heart muscle. Whether heart disease is detected early or not revealed until after heart failure, doctors have many kinds of remedies and treatments to reduce the risks of further heart disease. Broadly defined, there are three categories of heart disease treatment.

Take Two and Call Me in the Morning

If your heart is beating too quickly, or if the arteries around it contract tightly, the heart will be overtaxed, like revving an engine that's in park. Doctors prescribe three classes of pills called nitrates, beta blockers, and calcium channel blockers to let the heart run efficiently. Each of these types of heart disease treatments help the heart to beat regularly and slowly, or expand the arteries in the area of the heart so that blood flow is more regular.

Everyone has seen TV ads promoting Aspirin to thin the blood and reduce the risk of blood clots causing blocked arteries. While Aspirin does diminish the blood's ability to form clots, other drugs fight cholesterol, which can form plaque in the arteries and lead to heart failure. These drugs are usually simply called cholesterol reducing drugs or are part of a subcategory called statins.

As always, if your doctor prescribes medicine, remember to ask plenty of questions about what the drug is and what it does.

Scalpel, Please

When clogged cardiac arteries are life threatening, heart disease treatment can mean going into surgery. Some surgeries will clear the plaque in the arteries by cleaning or grinding it away or inflating a balloon in the arteries to break up the plaque. Bypass surgeries take a large blood vessel from elsewhere in the body and graft it to the blocked artery so blood can pass to the heart.

Surgeries for other conditions include implanting a pacemaker into the heart to treat arrhythmia, and doctors can transplant aortic valves into a patient whose valve has stopped functioning properly. In case no heart disease treatment is possible, such as in infants born with heart defects, artificial hearts do exist, though they are only a temporary solution until a heart transplant can be performed.

Treat The Whole System

Of course, before your heart gets desperate enough to need drugs or surgery, look to the risk factors you can control. Don't smoke; control your cholesterol so that plaque never gets a chance to clog your arteries; and exercise regularly, most days in a week, to keep your heart muscles healthy. Then maybe you might never need to know about heart disease treatment.

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