- [Narrator] Now that we've gone through all the normal function of the heart and blood vessels, how about some abnormalities, some problems. First off we have angina pectoris here. This occurs whenever the coronary arteries, those are the arteries that give blood to the actual cardiac muscle, are narrowed or partially blocked. If you narrow or partially block a coronary artery, less blood is getting to the actual cardiac muscle, the muscle of the heart. Less blood to the muscle of the heart, means less oxygen, less nutrients. The muscles start to have problems. Congestive heart failure. In this case, the pumping efficiency of the heart is going down. It could be that there's too much musculature so it can't move efficiently. It could be that there is some scar tissue preventing the heart from pumping efficiently. It could be numerous different factors. But congestive heart failure means something is reducing the efficiency of pumping in the heart. Embolism. It's a blockage of blood vessels. All of sudden the red blood cells or white blood cells are clumped up with the platelets and creating a blockage. If you completely block any blood vessel, that means no blood is traveling beyond it. So that can be quite a problem, depending on where that's going. Stroke. Impaired blood flow to the brain. In this case, if you either block the blood flow or a vessel ruptures in the brain and the blood flow seeps out, the blood flow now is not taking the essential oxygen molecules and the essential nutrients up to feed the brain. In that case, the brain cannot keep functioning properly at that location. Heart attack. A heart attack is also known as a myocardial infarction, or myocardial infarc. What happens here is, there's damage to the muscle, or the myocardium of the heart. This damage could be from lack of oxygen, could be from lack of nutrients, could be from an injury. But the damage is permanent, which results in scar tissue forming. A lot of times a heart attack will be found with intense chest pain. You'll feel kind of like this radiating pain from the chest going down your left arm. Might feel like that elephant is sitting on your chest, like it's going to collapse it. Breathing will become difficult. You'll have pain throughout your lower jaw, your neck, your upper back, maybe above the stomach area. Might even get nausea with this. You might have one of these symptoms, might have all of these symptoms. A heart attack varies depending on person to person. But usually you're going to have that pretty steadily, having that chest pain, radiating down the left arm. Why the left arm? Your heart is actually just slightly off-center of the left of your chest. So if you drew a line right in the middle, just a little bit to the left of that, so a little closer to your left arm. How do you diagnose if it's a chest pain, which is a heart attack? Or chest pain which is a serious stress attack? EKG. Blood test. EKG can measure the electrical impulses in the heart identifying what's going on helping out with diagnosis. You can do a blood test trying to find certain enzymes. If certain enzymes are increased in your blood, that means the heart muscle's been damaged. How do you prevent it? Prevention is trying to stay as healthy as possible. Sometimes these factors are out of our control. Sometimes it's genetic based and you have nothing to do with it. So the treatment, a lot of times, can be clot-busting medications. We have CABG here. A lot of things can help try to treat the heart attack but you can't necessarily reverse the heart attack, or reverse the damage. Here, we are seeing an image of a coronary angiogram. What you're looking at is the vessels running around the heart. Those red and blackish lines are the blood vessels, or the coronary arteries running around the heart. Feeding nutrients and gasses to the heart. The reason you can see these now, is because a contrast medium was injected. That contrast medium allows an x-ray to actually see the blood. Kind of think of if you put a dye in there, and then we're able to see the dye. Same idea, just using x-ray. But what's important to note here, is right there. That thinning of the vessel. Because that vessel is thinner now, it's showing where there is a problem because of narrowing. You have less blood getting through and it's impeding the flow of blood to that area of the heart. So you're looking at this coronary angiogram to help us identify where problems are around the heart. What we're looking at here now, is a normal heart. But we have a few things that are a little different. Look at the three white dotted ovals. You can see how in those vessels you have a build up of plaque. It's either completely blocked or the majority of it has been blocked to the blood flow. What's happened now is, we've gone through and had a bypass. This is a triple bypass. You can see there are three arteries that have been grafted on. They serve as arteries but in reality, they're actually veins. The veins are used to graft on to the aorta down passed these plaque blockages. What this allows for now is, an area where the blood can flow through beyond the blockage and still give blood to the heart. So we have these grafts. This is a triple bypass. Bypassing three areas that were quite problematic. How do you reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease? How do you reduce your risk? First off, smoking. Just don't smoke. It's really very simple. Or is it? To start smoking, it's a lot of time a peer pressure or something along those lines. So if you don't start smoking it helps out immensely. But if you've already started, it is not easy to quit. Smoking is one the most addictive drugs out there. Not just pure chemically because there are other things that are much more addictive on a chemical nature. But smoking also has a social addiction. You get in the habit of certain times of the day, maybe after a meal or maybe when you're walking to your car, or maybe you go out with a friend that smokes also. These times when you see the cigarette, you are in the habit of having a cigarette. Smoking, if you can just not start it, that's the best thing. If you're already smoking, give it a try to quit. I know it's not easy, but there are a lot of different ways out there, a lot of people are willing to help. A lot of different programs are willing to help. By quiting smoking, it helps out not only your cardiovascular risk, but helps out your respiratory, and a lot of other things in your body, believe it or not within the first couple of weeks you can notice a difference. Blood lipids. Watch your cholesterol. You're supposed to have some cholesterol, but you're not supposed to have too much of it. So keep an eye on how much is in your system. Exercise. I know we've all heard this. Regular exercise, healthy. But we just don't have time for it. It depends on what you do in life, what your lifestyle is. If you have a job that's very physical and you're constantly moving and working around, then no, that might be your exercise for the day. But if you have sedentary job, maybe you're at your desk all day, it is really important to get out and get some exercise. Whether it's simply doing a couple flights of stairs in the building you work at, or trying to walk around the house a couple of times, or maybe walk around the floor you work. Just something to get the blood moving a little bit more to try to keep the body in a little better shape. Blood pressure. If blood pressure's too high, it can cause damage to the heart. If you damage the heart, there's also more chance of cardiovascular disease. Weight. If you can stay within a healthy weight range it will decrease the risk of any of these cardiovascular problems. Someone who's overweight will increase the risk of heart attacks, increase of strokes, increase their risk of pretty much everything we just discussed because your body isn't meant to hold this much extra weight. Is it easy to lose weight if it's been that way your whole life? No, it's not easy. But by working out, following a healthy diet, most people can start to slowly lose some weight. You're not meant to lose it overnight. It's not healthy to drop two pounds a day so you drop 14 pounds in a week. That's not healthy. You want to slowly lose the weight as you change your lifestyle to include more exercise, include more healthy diet choices. It's not meant to be a quick one week, one month here. Losing weight is supposed to be a lifelong idea. Keeping healthy, lifelong ideas. Don't rush into it, saying it has to be done. If you're going to lose 10 pounds in a year, you still lost 10 pounds. That's great. It's not meant to be fast. Just the idea of thinking about trying to act on it and therefore hopefully it's not going to go any higher. But it might go a little bit lower. The disorder diabetes mellitus. Early diagnosis is probably one of the most important things here. Because treatment can help delay further problems of diabetes mellitus, but also reduce the risk of cardiovascular problems. Stress. Can we simply avoid stress? No, there is stress in life. That's the way it is. But what we want to try to do is avoid very long-term, chronic stress that's very high. Everyone can handle a high amount of stress here and there. But keeping high, chronic levels of stress for long periods, not the best idea if possible.