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Article Series: Heart Health
I Want A Healthy Heart!
What
Is Atherosclerosis?
Atherosclerosis is also called arteriosclerosis.
But either word may not mean much of anything to the average
person. In laymen’s terms, it means hardening of the
arteries. If you’ve been diagnosed with atherosclerosis, it’s not something
that just happened all at once. In fact, you’ve spent years
leading up to the diagnosis.
Throughout your lifetime fat and cholesterol mix together
with other material and begin to line the walls of your blood
vessels. This mixture is called plaque. As time passes, the
plaque becomes hard and gets thicker. This causes your blood
vessels to become more narrow and can even completely block
them if it goes untreated.
As you can imagine, it’s difficult for blood to pass through
these narrow vessels. As a result, stress is put on the heart.
This leads to heart disease and can eventually cause a heart
attack if there’s blockage in the actual coronary blood vessels
themselves.
In addition, pieces
of the hardened plaque can actually separate from the walls
and break away. When this happens the small
piece flows through the blood vessels and can actually cause
a heart attack or even a stroke.
To
make matters worse,
blood clots can form around the rogue piece of plaque and
block blood flow even further. The clots can also
travel to the brain, heart, or lungs. The tragic result of
this may be as serious as a stroke, heart attack, or pulmonary
embolism.
Unfortunately, there are rarely
symptoms of atherosclerosis
until you have a serious issue such as chest pain or even a
heart attack. Early stages of it can sometimes be heard through
a stethoscope, but usually more extensive testing is required
to diagnose hardening of the arteries.
The good news is that if you catch it early, there’s plenty
you can do to keep it from getting worse. Your doctor may prescribe
a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet in order to reduce the amount
of cholesterol and fat in your blood. You may also need to
increase your physical activity and work to lose some weight.
In more serious cases, medication may be required to help
lower cholesterol and even thin the blood to prevent clots.
Surgical intervention through angioplasty is also a treatment
option. A procedure called endarterectomy can be performed
to actually remove some of the plaque from the vessel walls,
though this isn’t as common.
In very serious cases of blockage, heart bypass surgery may
need to be performed. This creates a bypass around the blockage
in the heart and can prevent heart attacks from occurring.
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by SolveYourProblem.com
: 2008
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