Numerous studies show that about 68 million Americans suffer from some form of heart disease at this time, and the numbers keep growing. We need to know any warning signs our science discovers.
At least 1 million Americans will have a heart attack during this year. Over 1 million more will die of some type of cardiovascular disease, again not having any noticeable heart disease symptoms.
Every 34 seconds somebody dies of a heart attack in the U.S.A. For about 50% of victims, there were no heart attack symptoms — the first symptom was death!
Even according to the American Heart Association, nearly 70% of the United States population has some sort of heart disease symptoms.
It is very disturbing to know that cardiovascular disease kills more people than the next eight leading causes of death combined — and each year these deaths exceed the total U.S. death rates in World War I and II combined.
Our media likes to report that the number of heart attacks has stabilized or even improved somewhat over the past decade. Their reporters usually forget to mention that the incidence and death rates from heart failure have increased during the same period.
Recent studies have shown that people diagnosed with heart failure have a 50-65% chance of dying of their disease within five years of the diagnosis.
What is our human heart and what are the heart disease symptoms?
Our heart is a ball of muscle that is normally about the size of our fist. This organ beats over 100,000 times a day, pumping some 2,000 gallons of blood through 60,000 miles of blood vessels in our body, what is equal to about two-and-a-half times around our planet earth.
This incredible pumping machine has four chambers and is divided into right and left systems.
The right atria and ventricle pump blood to the lungs to pick up oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. The left atria and ventricle pump this cleaned and oxygenated blood to all organs and tissues of our body.
In case of the heart failure, one and eventually both of these pumping systems become defective, so blood begins to back up in the veins, causing poorly oxygenated blood congestion in our tissues and organs.
This condition leads to at least one of listed below symptoms:
* Shortness of breath, especially with exertion
* Swollen ankles
* Chronic, and often bloody, cough
* Extreme weight loss
* Extreme fatigue.
As the heart disease symptoms progress, they can worsen and become alarming.
In the early stages, the heart tries to fight back. One of the heart disease symptoms which a good cardiologist can discover is that the muscle becomes enlarged by working in extremely hard mode. The harder it works, the weaker it gets until finally it gives up, causing the blood to back up in the lungs, resulting in massive leakage of plasma fluid into the lungs.
Usually, before this begins, the patients can suffer from various organs failures and related problems. This happens because all the body’s veins are congested with poorly oxygenated blood. This can occur with any organs and tissues of the body, including kidneys, lungs, digestive tract, and even the brain.
Obviously, during such process the effected organs and tissues are deprived of oxygen because this backed up blood has very low level of it.
Various newest studies are suggesting the following leading to heart failure factors and better researched heart disease symptoms:
* Aging combined with an unhealthy diet * Mercury exposure - vaccines, dental amalgam, contaminated fish, and environmental causes, leading to pollution of our food and drinking water * Defects in heart valves
* Viral infections of cardiovascular system components
* Chronic hypertension * Repeated heart attacks
* Chronic inflammatory diseases
* Inherited heart disorders
* Vitamin D-3 deficiency
Heart failures are often not easy to spot. The following are signs to watch for:
* Shortness of breath, especially if worsening over time
* Swollen ankles, especially towards the end of the day
* Persistent dry cough
* Unexplained weight gain, usually from fluid buildup
Medical scientists discovered a number of certain inflammation markers, allowing to accurately predict rapidly advancing heart failure condition with increasing likelihood of dying:
They also discovered that high levels of inflammatory cytokines such as TNF-a, IL-6 and CRP, may cause a number of the heart disease symptoms of heart failure.
These latest studies found that the risk of the heart disease was highly correlated to hsCRP blood levels, but all these markers are showing that the more intense the inflammation, the greater the damage to the heart and the more aggressively its muscle will degenerate.
It was unquestionably demonstrated that inflammation, especially chronic elevation of inflammatory cytokines in the heart muscle and blood levels, directly and indirectly, cause massive destruction of the heart:
* Destroys heart-muscle cells
* Damages the lining of coronary blood vessels and cardiac micro-vessels (called endothelium)
* Damages the heart’s electrical conduction system
Other studies demonstrated that inflammation results in very high levels of free radicals and lipid peroxidation products in the heart muscle, leading to activation of prostaglandin pathways that even further accelerate inflammation, and formation of free radicals.
Even if the inflammation is not the primary cause of heart failure, it plays a major role in the acceleration and worsening of heart failure.
Medical experts find that mercury exposure and infections can be linked to previously well established reasons of heart failure as high blood pressure, failures of heart valves, and atherosclerosis. They are all associated with high levels of above inflammatory cytokines and oxidative damage.
Tests We Need if the Heart Failure is our Concern
The following tests help assess a patient’s condition and a need for treatments:
* hsCRP
* Homocysteine level
* TNF-a level
* IL-6
* Vitamin D blood levels
* Iron panel including free iron, ferritin (An iron-containing protein complex), transferring saturation, and total iron binding capacity
* Fibrinogen
These tests can explain why some heart-failure patients begin to deteriorate very rapidly and why a good nutritional supplementation, plays such a vital role in the heart protection.
Studies have shown that as the heart failure progresses, free radicals and lipid-peroxidation products begin to increase dramatically, not just in the heart, but in all organs that are being deprived of oxygen.
Ironically, most mainstream cardiologists do nothing to correct this, so we should ask for listed above tests ourself. Our doctors prefer prescribing new drugs and often don’t even explain the side effects their prescriptions might have. They usually explain our symptoms by aging and suggest taking these medications till the rest of our lives.
Nutritional Prevention And Treatment of Heart Failure
Even more troubling issue in finding a good heart disease care is that our modern doctors are not trained and often refuse to address the metabolic and nutritional issues of any and especially chronic autoimmune illnesses.
In most cases our doctors are suggesting that high cholesterol is the problem, suggesting to test it and trying to prescribe some popular for this purpose medications with known side effects. You can learn more on both subjects visiting related pages of this site by following links in this paragraph.
If we are looking for nutritional treatments for our heart health symptoms, it is always safer to discuss them with our doctor, even if s/he is not supporting this approach. On the other hand we need to be prepared if s/he gives us a usual for mainstream doctors’ response that “there is no evidence ... “.
Unfortunately this “evidence” is not included into our doctors’ training in most domestic medical schools. Even worse – our doctors are too busy to follow all the latest related to their very important work studies and scientific findings. We need to rely on our own research.
To learn more on the most important nutritional supplements which can be real life saviors for anybody looking for either prevention of a heart disease or improving a current heart health condition please follow the following links:
If nutritional approaches to prevention or improving your own health is something what you want to learn more about, please also see our Anti Aging Supplements section. Our Heart Nutrition page suggest even more information on this subject and you can visit it by following this link.
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