Heart Disease

Let’s face it – healthy living is something that everybody wants to eventually achieve, but the fact is that not everybody has the willpower to get off the couch and start working towards that healthy goal. And the more time people spend sedentary, and the richer the foods they eat, the further away they get from good health. The body can deteriorate enough to develop deadly sicknesses, like heart disease.

One fact about heart disease: it’s an umbrella term covering a wide range of diseases that, one way or the other, keep your heart from functioning at its peak, leading to eventual cardiac arrests, or in some extreme cases, heart failure. Another sad fact about heart disease is that it’s one of the biggest killers in the United States, ranked as the leading cause of death in 2007 alone.

There are too many variants of heart disease to list here; however, the variants could be broken down into groups divided according to which part of the circulatory system the disease affects.

The most common disease is hypertension, which could eventually lead to hypertensive heart disease. This disease causes the advent of an irregular pulse rate, sudden weight gain and shortness of breath.

Hypertensive heart disease can lead to a variety of other heart diseases, most common of which is coronary heart disease. This is caused by the build-up of atheromatous plaque around the inner walls of the coronary arteries bringing blood to the myocardium. The myocardium itself is subject to a wide array of heart conditions, since technically, the myocardium is the muscle of the heart.

Another completely unrelated branch of heart disease is the congenital heart disease branch. These heart conditions aren’t brought about by the deterioration of the body; rather, these are the hereditary conditions retained in the genetic code of individuals. These conditions leave the affected individuals structural defects and other such heart defects that keep the heart from functioning the way a normal heart would.

All these various heart diseases could eventually lead to cardiac arrests and heart failure. To prevent the eventual degradation of your heart, regular check ups with a physician could keep you informed about the state of your heart, and the steps you need to take to keep it from deteriorating any further.