Creating Heart Health

By Vinod Kumar M.D. and Ashish Gupta M.D.

People of all ages and levels of health will benefit from the information and life changing strategies that are laid out in Creating Heart Health. Yu will learn how to live healthier, feel happier, and arm yourself with strategies for success in starting your new lifestyle. The knowledge you obtain her will be life changing for you and those you care about.

Empower yourself and gain the knowledge it takes to become your own treatment specialist no one knows better than you! The only prescription that can cure this pandemic of poor health is the one that you prescribe to yourself lifestyle changes!

Its time that we all did our part to stop perpetuating a cycle of disease and start Creating Heart Health for ourselves and future generations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467858670

Book preview

© 2011 by Ashish Gupta, M.D. and Vinod Kumar, M.D. F.A.C.C. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 10/28/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4678-5868-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-3919-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-5867-0 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Introduction

1.

Get to Know Your Heart

2.

Heart Disease in the United States

3.

Understanding Your Risk

4.

From Cholesterol to Homocysteine:

5.

The Fabulous Four for Health

6.

It’s a Family Affair

7.

Time for a Test

8.

Atherosclerosis and Heart Attacks

Hypertension

10.

Hyperlipidemia

Diabetes and the Heart

12.

Peripheral Artery Disease

13.

Congestive Heart Failure

14.

Atrial Fibrillation

15.

Graphics

Introduction

You’ve probably heard a loved one or a doctor tell you numerous times, John it’s time to lose weight or Becky, you need to stop smoking, it’s killing you! or David, stop being a couch potato, it’ll make you sick! But what you probably haven’t understood is how important these small advises are to make big differences in not only how long you live, but how well you live.

This book is an effort to give heart patients like yourself, all of the tools you need to make small changes in outlook to drastically improve disease outcome. From ‘Getting to Know Your Heart’ to understanding the development of the 8 most common cardiac diseases that affect a significant number of Americans today, this book will equip you with all the knowledge you need about your heart and how you can keep it healthy. Easy to follow charts, tables, and pictures will help you extract and apply the vast knowledge contained in the book.

As you go thru this book, you will see how heart attacks are the #1 killers in America. We have included the Framingham Risk Analysis which will help you add up your risk of developing one in the next ten years!

Using simple analogies, we have explained the meaning behind so many of the words we all throw around every day without knowing what they actually mean, like diabetes and hypertension. What will amaze you is that these diseases affect millions of Americans, and you could very well be next, unless you put a foot forward in the right direction.

But what is that right direction?

Well, of course-the Fabulous Four of Health! These are the pillars behind the cardiac reversal program we have developed for our patients. In this program we encourage our patients not only to

comply with principles of good evidence based medicine, but add those components which are just as important in predicting disease outcome: diet, physical activity, abstinence from smoking, and managing stress.

We share with you a typical day at the Good Family, Good Heart seminar, where you and your spouse are requested to come together and gain from a positive experience of healthy living.

This book will inspire you to act—it will give you simple techniques to put all of this vast knowledge into action. It will motivate you to increase compliance with your medications and practice a healthy lifestyle. Before you know it, you will have made a healthier you, a healthier family, and a healthier Kern County.

So, next time you go out for dinner, take out a few seconds to tell the waiter to be light on the cheese because that cheese just might end up going farther than your stomach. It just might be enough to tip the balance and put you in the Emergency Room for a few hours.

We wish you a happy and healthy reading!

Ashish Gupta, M.D. Vinod Kumar M.D., F.A.C.C.

1.

Get to Know Your Heart

Heart is just a muscle. And without proper care, muscles break down.

With the possible exception of the brain, no other organ in our body carries as much physical and emotional baggage as the heart. In our culture, the heart epitomizes who we are. We call people soft-hearted or hard-hearted, accuse people of closing their hearts to others, and say someone died of a broken heart. We experience heartache and heartbreak and are heartfelt or heartless. If someone is hearty, they’re full of life and robust. If someone has heart, they’re brave and fearless.

Yet, we treat our heart with such disdain. We smoke, eat fatty meals, don’t get enough exercise, and put ourselves in stressful situations—all without the slightest regard for the organ that keeps us going day in and day out. We forget that the heart is, first and foremost, a muscle. And without proper care, muscles break down.

Before we get into all the things that can go wrong with the heart, let’s take a minute to examine this most amazing structure, one that will beat an average of 3.3 billion times by the time you’re 70.

Your Heart: Just the Basics

How big is my heart?

Close your hand into a fist. There, that’s the size of your heart. And yet consider what this small, 10-ounce muscle does 24 hours a day, seven days a week: It pumps—about 1.3 gallons of blood a minute, 1,900 gallons a day, 48 million gallons by the time you hit 70. Try that with your basement sump pump!

The Four Chambers of The Heart

How does my heart pump blood?

The heart is actually two pumps: one on the right, which pumps oxygen-poor blood through the pulmonary artery into the lungs to pick up oxygen; and one on the left, which receives that oxygen-rich blood back from the lungs and pumps it out into the rest of the body.

As you can see from the illustration above, the heart is composed of four main chambers through which blood moves:

Image494.JPG

■ Right atrium:

Collects oxygen-poor blood from two large veins and contracts to push it into the right ventricle

■ Right ventricle: Contracts to push oxygen-poor blood out of the heart to the lungs

■ Left atrium:

Collects oxygen-rich blood from the pulmonary veins and contracts to push it into the left ventricle

■ Left ventricle:

Contracts to push oxygen-rich blood out of the heart into the aorta and from there to the rest of the body.

Between each atrium and ventricle are valves that open and close to let blood in and out. If these valves don’t work properly, we run into problems like mitral valve prolapse, which you’ll learn about later in this book.

I wish I could show you a little movie to demonstrate how blood moves through the heart, but since I can’t, you’ll have to imagine it from my description.

From the aorta, the larger artery that carries blood from the left ventricle of the heart, the blood passes through your coronary arteries to deliver fresh oxygen and other nutrients to the heart itself, then heads out to the rest of your body.

Meanwhile, on the other end, exhausted blood moves back up your body into the heart, drawn there by pressure when the heart contracts, similar to sucking liquid up a straw.

How does my heart beat?

Just as that basement sump pump has to be plugged into an electrical outlet to move the water out of your basement, your heart is also powered by electricity. Instead of plugging into a wall socket, it uses electricity generated by cells that make up its own natural pacemaker, called the sinus, or sinoatrial, node. These cells are called pacemaker cells.

They operate like the wave at a football game, generating a series of electrical currents that move down the heart, stimulating it to contract in sections, first the upper two chambers, then the lower two chambers, with a slight pause in between. These waves are what we measure during an electrocardiogram, or EKG. Ideally, your heart beats according to a steady rhythm, called the sinus rhythm. If there’s a glitch in the electrical system, that rhythm gets out of sync. This is called an arrhythmia. We’ll talk more about arrhythmias later in the book.

The heart normally contracts at about 72 beats a minute. But when you’re excited and adrenaline courses through your bloodstream, it signals your sinus node to speed up, increasing the number of beats per minute and sending larger quantities of oxygenated blood through your bloodstream. Conversely, when you’re resting, or if you’re