HEART DISEASE

What comes to your mind when I pronounce the word HEART?

For some of you it might be a symbolic representation of Love, Breakup & romantic feelings. These
people even philosophise about heart & say that love is not what the mind thinks but is infact what the
heart feels. However, you don’t have to be excited I’m not going to talk about the symbolic meaning of
Heart. Rather, I’m going to talk about an organ which pumps blood in our body and keeps us alive.

For the sake of time and organization, I’ll limit my talk on Heart Disease, where I’ll first
present a brief introduction about it, second I’ll present the sign and symptoms, third I’ll discuss about
the causes and fourth I’ll recommend the do’s and don’ts that we need to consider to prevent Heart
disease.

Cardiovascular disease is a group of disorder of the Heart and blood vessels which includes
coronay heart disease, cerebrovascular disease and rheumatic heart disease.

According to Dr.Stanley Davidson who is an expert in human anatomy, the heart acts as two serial
pumps that share several electrical and mechanical components. The right heart circulates
deoxygenated blood to the lungs where it is oxygenated and the left heart circulates to the different
parts of the body.

Now as the heart supplies blood to different system of the body, it two needs blood for its own
survival i.e supplied by right and left coronary artery. However, according to the national service of the
united kingdom, any obstruction in the blood flow of these artery leads to occlusion of blood vessels
which is known as Atherosclerosis which means a buildup of fatty plaque in the artery.

According to WHO, 4 out of 5 cardiovascular death are due to heart attack and stroke. Among
them, onethird of these death occur prematurely in people under 70 yrs of age.

Now, let me explain about the risk factor related to heart diseases. Whether the risk factor are
modifiable or not.

According to J. Larry Jameson, author of Harrison’s Principles of internal medicine explains that

Family history, age, sex in which men are at higher risk are non modifiable risk factors whereas obesity,
smoking, alcohol, high cholesterol, sedentarylife style, unhealthy food habits, stress, diseases like
diabetes mellitus, high blood pressure are modifiable risk factors.

Everyday, through advertisements we hear that smoking kills, smoking is injurious to health….but
how exactly.