Heart disease is a deadly disease that has been ranked as the top cause of death for the past 20 years, even though its mortality rate is starting to decline.
The heart is actually a group of muscles that work to pump oxygenated blood and nutrients throughout various parts of the body. The heart muscles can fully function only if the heart receives oxygen from two main arteries whose network stretches to cover every part of the heart. However, it can be life-threatening if these two arteries suffer from abnormalities.
In Thailand, coronary artery disease is caused by undesirable materials attaching to the walls of the coronary arteries, thereby causing the arteries to narrow. These materials can be cholesterol, protein or fat, and when the walls of the coronary arteries are filled with undesirable things, they narrow and lose their elasticity. What results then is higher blood pressure and fissures in the arterial walls. These fissures can cause blood clots to form and rupture, possibly causing blood clots to create an obstruction that fully block an entire artery in the end.
Once you have this disease, you will experience chest pain and discomfort in the middle of your chest. This can happen in either just the left side or both sides, but it usually does not happen only in the right side. In some cases, the patient experiences shooting pain in the left arm or both arms, and some patients experience tightness or congestion in the neck or pain in the jaw similar to a toothache. These symptoms can happen when exercising such as when walking fast or going up the stairs or when running or angry. In patients with coronary artery obstruction or acute myocardial infarction, the symptoms will be very severe, and other symptoms may also be present, including excessive sweating and loss of consciousness.
Risk Factors for Heart Disease
- Being in your 40s. This is a time period when you have to seriously pay attention to your health (although today it is also common to find heart disease in people aging 30-40 years.
- Genetics. People whose parents have history of heart disease are at greater risk of developing heart disease.
- Sex. Men are at greater risk of developing heart disease than women.
- Smoking.
- High cholesterol. People with high cholesterol are several times at greater risk of developing heart disease than people with normal blood cholesterol levels. This is because cholesterol is a leading cause of accumulation along arterial walls and arterial obstruction, especially the coronary arteries.
- Diabetes. Excessively high blood sugar levels over extended periods without sufficient control is a contributing factor for weakening and poor strength of the arterial walls, which can cause coronary arteries to narrow.
- Hypertension is another risk factor. Having higher blood pressure does not mean that blood can better be supplied to different parts of the body than people with normal blood pressure. On the contrary, it causes blood vessels to constrict, which can lead to cardiac ischemia.
Warning Signs of Heart Disease
Excessive fatigue during exercise or when walking fast and difficulty breathing in that might happen constantly or only when exercising or during physical exertions or only at night. Heart disease symptoms may also include pain or tightness in the center of the chest or the left side or both sides. The person will also be unable to lie down horizontally normally, or else there will be constant fatigue when breathing and chest discomfort. It is also possible for the person to experience labored breathing by waking up at night to pant or to lose consciousness without an explanation. There can also be edema in the limbs without a known cause and cyanosis in the ends of the hands and feet and lips.
How to Check Whether You Have Heart Disease or Not
- The doctor will start by asking about history of various suspected illnesses along with various risk factors of heart disease.
- The doctor will perform an overall physical examination covering all of the body’s systems, including the cardiovascular system and will listen to your heartbeat and measure your blood pressure.
- The doctor will order a chest x-ray and electrocardiogram (EKG). Small electric probes will be placed at different parts of the body, including the chest, arms and legs, and then a graph will show electrical waves for the doctor to read and diagnose the severity of the disease. There is also an exercise stress test (EST) when the patient walks or runs on a treadmill to increase the heartrate in order to observe changes in the electrical waves of the heart. For people who are not able to run on a treadmill, echocardiography will be administered to examine the physiology of the heart, the thickness of the walls of the heart and its movements and contractions. This technique can be used to diagnose nearly every type of heart disease.
- Computed tomography of the coronary arteries (coronary artery CT scan) is used to test and analyze narrowed blood vessels due to fat accumulation in the arterial walls, which can cause acute myocardial infarction and heart failure. The test helps doctors appropriately control and treat various risk factors for heart disease in each patient and can be used to test the function of the heart muscles and pericardium.
- If you suspect that you might have heart disease, another test that can help provide a clear diagnosis is coronary angiography or the insertion of a catheter into the coronary arteries in order to examine them.
