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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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What Else Can Cause Heart Attack? Heart attack, also known as myocardial infarction, occurs when blood cannot flow to a part of the heart for sufficient long period of time that part of the heart muscle is damaged or dies. A person who has heart attack should receive emergency treatment within a hour or 2 of the first onset of symptoms. Prolonging waiting time would lower the chance of survival. Every year, more than a million Americans have heart attack. According to the American Heart Association (AHA), about every 34 seconds, someone in the United States has a heart attack. Among nearly 1,500 Singaporeans who had heart attack each year, 30 to 40 percent of them died before reaching a hospital from heart arrhythmias or severe heart damage. Heart muscle of heart attack victim could not be regenerated. Hence, the victim could have a weak heart. Some survivors of heart attack might suffer from disabling heart failure. Risk factors like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, overweight or obese, stress, sedentary lifestyle, and smoking can cause atherosclerosis and progressive blockage of the coronary arteries. People with these risk factors are at higher risk of getting heart attack.
However, there is increasing number of patients who had heart attack but had no significant blockage of the heart arteries. These patients have so called “diastolic dysfunction”. To understand this better, it is necessary to know how heart cycle works. Heart cycle has 2 phases, namely systole and diastole. During systole, the left ventricles (lower heart chamber) contract, pumping blood through the body. But during diastole phase, the left ventricles relax and fill with incoming blood that is being returned from the body via the left atrium (upper heart chamber). In diastolic dysfunction, the heart muscle becomes stiff and cannot relax fully. This causes incomplete filling of blood in the ventricles and elevation of pressure inside the ventricle. As a result, it is more difficult for blood to flow into the heart from the lungs. In some severe cases, the elevation of pressure in the lungs forces the water to flow into the lung spaces causing so called “diastolic heart failure”. Estimation showed that almost half of the patients at the emergency department for sudden heart failure have “diastolic heart failure’. These patients, after their heart failure has resolved, often have normal heart pump function. Diastolic heart dysfunction is common among elderly women and less common in men. Breathlessness is commonly presented among patients with such dysfunction. They tend to get breathless easily on activities, which could be done comfortably in the past. Diagnosis of diastolic dysfunction can be made easily with an ultrasound test of the heart (echocardiogram). While high blood pressure is the most common cause of diastolic dysfunction, there are other factors that could stress the heart and precipitate diastolic heart failure. For instance, abnormal rhythms like atrial fibrillation that lowers the pump function of the atrium, fast heart rate that reduces the time available for blood to fill the left ventricle, increased salt intake, excessive fluid consumption and insufficient blood flow to the heart muscles are some of the possible factors. Atrial fibrillation is a type of abnormal heart rhythm causing the upper chamber to beat so fast that it is can simply lose its pumping function. People, who are more than 50 years old and have recent onset of serious breathlessness and underlying high blood pressure, should consult their doctors since they might be victims of diastolic dysfunction. Early diagnosis and taking preventive actions are paramount to avoid the precipitation of sudden diastolic heart failure, which might be potentially life threatening. Lifestyle changes like not smoking, salt reduction, weight loss and reduction of alcohol intake; monitoring of high blood pressure, and management of heart artery disease can reduce stress on the heart. Sometimes, medications might be necessary to lower the heart rate or lower hemodynamic stress on the heart.
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