Causes of Heart Disease
The most common causes of heart failure are coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Treating these problems can prevent or improve heart failure.
High Blood Pressure
Blood pressure is the force of blood pushing against the walls of the arteries. Blood pressure is "high" if it stays at or above 140/90 mmHg over a period of time. High blood pressure stiffens blood vessels and makes the heart work harder. Without treatment, the heart may be damaged.
Diabetes
This disease occurs when the level of sugar in the blood is high. The body doesn't make enough insulin or doesn't use its insulin properly. Insulin is a hormone that helps convert food to energy. High sugar levels can damage blood vessels around the heart.
Other Causes
Other diseases and conditions that can lead to heart failure are:
- Heart muscle diseases. These diseases may be present at birth or due to injury or infection.
- Heart valve disorders. These problems may be present at birth or due to infections, heart attacks, or damage from heart disease.
- Arrhythmias or irregular heartbeats. These heart problems may be present at birth or due to heart disease or heart defects.
- Congenital heart defects. These heart problems are present at birth.
Other factors also can injure the heart muscle and lead to heart failure. These include:
- Treatments for cancer, such as radiation and chemotherapy
- Thyroid disorders (having either too much or too little thyroid hormone in the body)
- Alcohol abuse
- HIV/AIDS
- Cocaine and other illegal drug use
- Too much vitamin E
Heart damage from obstructive sleep apnea may also cause heart failure to worsen. In obstructive sleep apnea, your breathing stops or gets very shallow while you’re sleeping. This can deprive the heart of oxygen and increase its workload. Treating this sleep problem may improve heart failure.
Conventional Treatments of Heart Diseases
In any stage of heart failure, treatments will include lifestyle measures, medicines, and ongoing care. Conventional treatments of more severe heart failure may also need medical procedures and surgery. First and foremost healthy eating habits must be incorporated into daily life. Then the underlying causes must be treated, which could be high blood pressure, diabetes or coronary artery disease.
Heart Disease Medications: There are different types of medications such as beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, diuretics, ACE inhibitors, statins, AT2 receptor antagonists, digoxin, and isosorbide dinitrat/hydralazing hydrochloride. However these types of medications leave deep side effects such as impotence, blood sugar problems, blood fatty substance abnormalities, swollen legs, constipation etc.
Balloon Angioplasty: This is a non-surgical procedure through which the surgeon or the doctor dilates the blood vessels so that the flow of blood becomes more convenient.
Bypass Graft Surgery: This is a critical surgical operation where a blood vessel part from a different part of the body is transplanted to the heart, giving it a new and convenient way for blood circulation.
Electrophysiologic Methods or Pacemakers: This is another surgical process through which an alien power source is placed at heart to maintain its regular pumping by electrical impulses.
Non-surgical ablation: is used for many types of arrhythmias, is performed in a special lab called the electrophysiology (EP) laboratory. During this non-surgical procedure a catheter is inserted into a specific area of the heart.
Surgical ablation: is a procedures used for treating atrial fibrillation can be "minimally invasive" or traditional "open" surgery and may be combined with other surgical therapies such as bypass surgery, valve repair, or valve replacement.
Stent: is a small metal mesh tube that acts as a scaffold to provide support inside your coronary artery. A balloon catheter, placed over a guide wire, is used to insert the stent into the narrowed coronary artery.
Heart transplant: When all other treatments fail to control symptoms, some people who have heart failure receive healthy hearts from deceased donors.
Patients Medical Heart Disease & Cardiology Treatments
Healing measured through holistic cardiology: If you are diagnosed with a heart, our experienced and highly trained experts’ team will be there to help you throughout your healing process. This does not interrupt with your regular treatment. It only enhances the process by providing holistic approach as well as the conventional approach to the problem. Since our team of medical doctors use conventional as well as holistic knowledge, Patients Medical is in a much better position to monitor the whole person.
At Patients Medical we use a three pronged solution to heart disease. Our focus is to treat the underlying causes of the cardiology heart problem.
First and foremost is the time we spend with the patient to insure the patient is not misdiagnosed. Here the treatment does not only treat the disease, but it treats the whole patient as well, with an aim for complete betterment of the person. We spend more time with the individual to determine and provide the necessary tests to insure the patient is properly diagnosed and an individual program/regiment is created for their treatment.
The second prong of our heart disease solution is Hyperbaric Oxygen. Hyperbaric oxygen treatments infuse the body with oxygen, increasing O2 levels by up to 1000% in body tissues. As a result of elevating the atmospheric pressure inside the hyperbaric chamber plus administering 100 percent oxygen to the cardiac patient by means of a facemask, the treated person receives a sharply increased amount of oxygen dissolved in the plasma. Such improved blood oxygen content tends to give the damaged heart an assist in oxygenating body tissues.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy has tremendous value for recovery of the cardiac patient. It increases oxygen intake for building collateral circulation. Because the hyperbaric chamber pressurizes the atmosphere, hyperbaric acts as a detoxifier as well. It gently forces oxygen into the tissues through this pressurization, thereby, removing toxins, chemicals and other unwanted impurities. Since the heart’s primary function is to supply oxygenated blood to the whole body, hyperbaric oxygen therapy is essential.
The third prong of our heart disease solution is to treat each person as an individual and each with a distinct treatment requirement. Our doctors will plan a customized routine after a thorough hearing of all your problems. With the help of our Integrative Health and Preventive Cardiology Program along with a unique complimentary or alternative medicine, you will be able to hasten your healing process and prevent the disease. Patients Medical also uses Heart Plaque Therapy to remove plaque from t he arteries without surgery.
Integrative Cardiology Doctors Treating Heart Disease
Doctor 1 – brief bio and link to their page
Doctor 2 – brief bio and link to their page
Doctor 3 – brief bio and link to their page
Patients Medical Supplements
Our Cardiovascular Support Formulas and Cardiovascular Functional Medicine can help you to prevent heart diseases, if you are prone to one. With regular usage of these supplements you will be able to fight against the disease in a more holistic way. The day to day work pressure and hypertension will fail to affect your heart like before. If taken with regular treatments, these can help you a lot to cure faster and completely from your heart disease.
Also other supplements like Blood Sugar Support Formulas, Stress Management Formulas, Men’s Health Formulas, Women’s Health Formulas, Ayurvedic Botanical Formulas, Foundation Nutrition, Homeopathic Formulas, Medical Foods, Specialty Products can help you a lot in maintain a good health, and thus prevent any heart disease.
Definitions of Heart Disease Terms
Angina Pectoris: A pain of paroxysmal thoracic. It is accompanied with suffocating feeling, resulting death.
Atria: It is one of the heart chambers. It is rather thin walled. It helps heart to circulate blood in the ventricles. It is divided into two parts – (i) right atrium, (ii) left atrium.
Myocarditis: Myocardium is a part of the muscular heart wall. When it suffers from soreness or inflammation, it is called myocarditis.
Cardiovascular: It is everything related to heart and its’ various blood vessels.
Artrioventricular: It is everything related to the heart atrium and to the heart ventricle.
Ventricle: It is a chamber of the heart. It is divided into two parts – (i) right ventricle, (ii) left ventricle. Its wall is rather muscular. It helps the heart to circulate blood in the pulmonary and systemic circulation.
Blood Vessels: It comprises of tubular vessels that transport blood. They are made up of - arteries, capillaries, arterioles, veins and venules.
Next Steps:
Poor health can significantly affect your life. Improve your life by changing to good health. Call our patient coordinator at 1-212-679-9667 or click on Request an Appointment to schedule an appointment with one of our doctors for evaluation and testing.
We are located at: Patients Medical PC, 800 Second Avenue, Suite 900 (Between 42nd & 43rd Street), Manhattan, NYC, New York, NY 10017.
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Article Last Updated: 06/26/2009