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Acyanotic heart disease diagnosis
How do we know a patient has an acyanotic heart disease? Learn how health care professionals use a variety of tools to diagnosis these conditions, such as stethoscopes, chest x-rays, echocardiogram, and electrocardiograms (ECG or EKG). Created by Leslie Samuel.
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isn't putting a baby on a x ray dangerous(5 votes)
X-rays are ionizing radiation and do put the baby at risk for cancer later. The risk is calculated to be pretty low so if there is a compelling reason to get the x-ray such as diagnosing something that might be deadly otherwise then the benefits are felt to outweigh the risks. But, your intuition is right and they should be avoided (like all tests) if not needed.(8 votes)
How can you tell if their is internal structural defects on a CXR?(2 votes)
You can't. But you can see it's sequelae like fluid in the lungs or right ventricular hypertrophy,(2 votes)
I gather that acyanotic (video title) and non-cyanotic (actually in the video) mean the same thing, but which term is more common?(1 vote)- Acyanotic is generally used. I've never heard non-cyanotic used medically.(4 votes)
Where in the world do people use the term "EKG" versus "ECG?"(2 votes)
In Serbia, we use EKG (elektroKardiogram)(3 votes)
Will patients with this disease be more likely to develop lung conditions?(1 vote)
How treat Acyanotic heart disease(1 vote)
As far as I know, some doctors treat Acyanotic heart disease by doing surgeries and they also use medicines that can lower the blood pressure. The treatment part isn't mentioned by the professor?(1 vote)
- Why are x-rays harmful and how much damage does one chest x-ray produce?(1 vote)
X-rays are ionizing radiation, and can cause some "holes" to be shot into your tissues' DNA. On a small scale, this isn't generally a problem, as your body repairs itself fairly easily. One chest x-ray will not likely have any (noticeable) negative effect on your body, and may end up saving your life, should an unseen problem be discovered.
If you were to get multiple chest x-rays, and often enough, you could develop cancer, as some of your DNA may not repair itself correctly, leading to a detrimental mutation and unchecked copying of tissue cells.
The more exposure you get, the more likely you are to develop cancer eventually.
If you have a lot of exposure over a short period of time, you can get acute radiation sickness, including vomiting, hair loss, skin burns, and lots of other problems (which could kill you well before cancer develops). Chest x-rays do not have this kind of exposure. This would be more like if you went to a nuclear meltdown site, like the Fukishima reactor or Chernobyl, Ukraine, during clean-up, and without adequate safety precautions.(1 vote)
Video transcript
Voiceover: With
non-cyanotic heart dieseae, you have some type of a congenital defect. Congenital just means that the
individual is born with it, but what happens as a
result is that blood moves from the left side of the heart
to the right side of the heart. In this example, you see that
we have a little hole here in the wall between the left
ventricle and the right ventricle. Since the pressure is
higher on this left side that's sending the blood
throughout the entire body, that is going to cause
blood to go from the left to the right ventricle. Now, my question is, how
does the doctor diagnose that an individual has some
non-cyanotic heart defect? Well, one of the first things
is that you can hear it. So, let's draw a little ear here. You'll be able to hear it, and also, you should be able see it. We'll talk about how you
can do those things ... let's put a little pupil here. All right, so, you'll be able to hear it, and you'll be able to see it. Now for the hearing, well,
just think about it this way. Let's say you have a garden hose. This is my garden hose, and we have water that's flowing
through that garden hose, and all of a sudden, we decide "Hey we're going to put a
little tiny hole in the hose." So, right here we have a little hole. What's going to happen? Well, of course, you're going
to have water flying out in places that you don't want it to go, and it's going to kind of
squirt in this direction. If you come closely here,
you'll be able to hear that. Right? Yeah! Of course, that makes sense. Well, how does a doctor do that? Well, the doctor can't go in and put his ear right by that hole. What he can do is take
this little handy device that we're all so familiar with, that's called a stethoscope, and this end, it's going in his ears. Then, you have this tube, and then, you have this chest piece, and where you can listen
to the sounds of the heart. Depending on the type of
non-cyanotic heart disease that individual might have, he'll be able to hear the squirting or some type of a characteristic sound that's the result of that defect. This process, I'll give
you a fancy name for it, it called auscultation. All right, so, that is
when the doctor comes with the stethoscope and since
this is a congenital defect, when the baby is just born, he listens to the sound of the heart, and say, "Hey. I'm
hearing something that's it's not exactly what
I would like to hear." So, that is one way, by
listening to the heart. Then, you can see the heart. How do you see the heart? Well, by taking a picture. Unfortunately, you can't
just take a regular camera. You need a more expensive machine, and that expensive machine
is going to allow you to be able to visualize the chest area, and with that, it's just
like we're taking a picture. It's just a little different. It's not going to have
all the nice fancy colors, and you'll be able to see the heart. All right, so, this is my heart. This is called a chest x-ray. All right. You going x-ray machine. You put the baby in the x-ray machine. You take a picture, and you look to see, all right, is there some
type of a structural defect that's not suppose to be there? That's one way to visualize the heart. There's a second way to visualize
the heart that's even better. Yeah, you can take a picture, or you can take a video. Right? With a fetal or postnatal ... so, fetal is while the fetus is
still inside the mother's womb, and postnatal, once that baby is born, you take an echocardiogram. So, echo ... ooh, that doesn't look right. Echocardiogram. What that does is you're
using sound waves, and you're projecting it onto a screen, so, that you can see the heart. You see the heart as it's beating. You see it contracting.
You see the valves closing. You can also see in real time if there are defects that should not be there. So, that's number two. We can visualize the heart by either using a chest x-ray or a fetal or
postnatal echocardiogram. There are some other
issues that we might notice with non-cyanotic heart disease. We said that blood is
going from the left side to the right side, and
if you have more and more blood going to the right side where it's ultimately going to your lungs, so, you have more gong to your lungs some coming back but not
going as much to the body, eventually, you're going to get buildup in pressure in your lungs. If you get a buildup in
pressure in your lungs, that can feed back to the right side causing buildup in pressure over here too. If we have that buildup
in pressure over here, the ventricle has to do much more work. Now, if you go to the gym,
and you're exercising, and you're doing a lot of work, what's going to happen to your muscles? Well, their going to get larger. Their going to get significantly stronger. That's going to start to happen on the right side where you
have a larger heart muscle. If you have larger heart muscle, you will notice this when a doctor comes and does an electrocardiogram. So, we take an electrocardiogram. Cardiogram where we are looking at the electrical signals throughout the heart. With that, I'm going
to just sketch one out. Right now we have our P wave, and then, our QRS complex, and then, we have our T wave. If I look at that, so, this P wave, our QRS complex, and
then, we have our T wave. The P wave gives me the
electrical activity of the atria. The QRS complex is
given you the electrical activity of the ventricles. All right. I'm not going to go into all the details. I'm just going to kind of make it just that simple for now. If you have enlargement of the ventricles, or the right ventricle, what's that going to do to the signal? Do you expect to see the same signal, a larger signal, a smaller signal? Well, if you have a bigger muscle, I would expect to see a significantly larger signal here with the ventricles. If that feeds back to your atria, and you have a larger right atrium, well, you might see this being a larger, a little broader, a little wider. There are characteristics
features that you can see in the electrocardiogram, the ECG or EKG, depending on where you are in the world. That can give you an indication as to whether there is some type of a dysfunction in the
heart, as a result of the load that's placed on the right ventricle, and the right atrium, and
enlargement of those structures. So, you can hear it. You can see it. There are some functional
things that you can notice in the electrocardiogram to help diagnose a non-cyanotic heart defect.