Amanda
Several years ago, people were very unfamiliar with the terms “angina pectoris” and “coronary heart disease”. They thought these terms only exist inside hospitals. But for today, nearly every adult knows these terms, they don’t just happen to be inside the hospital anymore, they have already come out to the whole society, communities and families. The emergencies of coronary heart disease, such as angina pectoris and myocardial infarction, are becoming heated topics for the conversations.
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Coronary Heart Disease
Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the term that describes what happens in your heart when your heart’s blood supply is blocked
or interrupted by a buildup of fatty substances in the coronary arteries, that will cause angina pectoris, myocardial infarction,
heart failure, arrhythmias and even sudden death.
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Potential Causes
The cause of CHD is when there are a lot of low density lipoproteins (LDL) in our diet, those LDL will send a big amount of cholesterol from the liver to our body for cell activities, which also raises the level of blood cholesterol.
Because of the high levels of blood cholesterol, these will result in atherosclerosis, which means the fatty deposits form plaques in the vessel walls. The atherosclerotic plaques may rupture and trigger blood clot formation which is also called thrombus. As there are also coronary thrombus inside the coronary arteries. Those thrombus are the culprits of the CHD.
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Main Symptoms
The CHD have following main symptoms:
1.
Chest pain (angina): you may feel pressure
or tightness in your chest.
2.
Shortness of breath: you may feel like you couldn’t breath.
3.
Feeling faint: you may feel dizzy when the blood supply is not enough.
4.
Fatigue: if the heart can not pump enough blood to meet the body needs, you may feel unusually tired.
5.
Heart attack: the completely blocked coronary arteries will cause the heart attack, this include pressure, arm pain, shortness of pain ect.
However, not everyone has the same symptoms, and some may not have any symptoms before CHD is diagnosed.
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Precautions
There are several suggestions for us about how to prevent CHD from happening in our body.
1.
Eating in a healthy, balanced diet. We’d better have a low saturated fat, high fibre diet as we eat for everyday, this will
efficiently reduce the risk of high levels of cholesterol in the blood, which can also prevent us from suffering from CHD.
2.
Doing regular physical exercise. Doing
exercise can help to improve the efficiency
of our heart and circulatory system which
can lower the level of cholesterol in our blood and also keep the blood pressure at a
healthy level.
3.
Keep a healthy weight. Having a healthy
weight can reduce the chance of developing high blood pressure.
4.
Give up smoking and reduce the consumption of alcohol. Smoking is the major risk factor of developing atherosclerosis and drinking will increase the risk of heart attack.
To sum up, coronary heart disease is a serious heart disease that is caused by high levels of cholesterol in our blood. It is estimated around 200 million people are living with coronary heart disease globally. If you don’t want to be one of them, just follow the institution we mentioned above and have a healthy life experience!!
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