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Health and medicine
Course: Health and medicine > Unit 3
Lesson 1: Heart disease and heart attacks- Heart disease and heart attacks
- Stenosis, ischemia and heart failure
- Thromboemboli and thromboembolisms
- What is coronary artery disease?
- Risk factors for coronary artery disease
- Atherosclerosis
- Heart attack (myocardial infarction) pathophysiology
- Heart attack (myocardial infarct) diagnosis
- Heart attack (myocardial infarct) medications
- Heart attack (myocardial infarction) interventions and treatment
- Healing after a heart attack (myocardial infarction)
- Complications after a heart attack (myocardial infarction)
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Risk factors for coronary artery disease
Created by Vishal Punwani.
Want to join the conversation?
- One more question. He says that cigarette smoking will increase the chances of getting Coronary Artery Disease, right. I don't actually smoke, but that includes trying to avoid inhaling the smoke from other people smoking,right?(10 votes)
- Yes, inhaling the smoke may cause atherosclerosis (buildup of plaque in the blood vessel) so even breathing in the fumes increases the chance of CHD(8 votes)
- Probably a silly question, but is there a difference between heart issues and cigar smoking vs. cigarette? (or pipe, etc) Or are cigarettes more of a singular threat than other methods of smoking?(8 votes)
- Honestly, both will cause severe heart damage. I did a search if the risks are different, but several sites say that cigar have the same affect as cigarettes. Both are disgusting and harmful to your hearts and lungs. Here is a link if you want more information.
http://www.webmd.com/smoking-cessation/effects-of-smoking-pipes-and-cigars
Also, do a Bing or Google search about it. Hope that helps!!(6 votes)
- can you get blood clots anywhere else in the body or just the heart(4 votes)
- Hi Sophie,
From personal experience you can definitely get a blood clot in other parts of the body for example;
If you get a clot in the brain etc. it's call a stroke
If blood clots develop in arms,legs,feet it can be called Deep Vein Thrombosis
Things associated to Deep Vein Thrombosis are
1.Numbness
2.Pain
3.Swollen Areas where pain or Numbness is located
Now clots can also form in medical devices which many are unaware about for example Port-a-cath, Catheter,Centeral Line,PICC usually a procedure of flushing devices and the use of TPA prevent this.
Many physicians are quite knowledgeable and Emergency Departments have policy's in place to react accordingly to strokes,dvt etc. as they need to react fast to make sure no damage can be done by blood clots the good news is there are many pharmecuetical products and procedures that can help anyone who experiences these types of clots.
Should you have any further questions I will be happy to answer them.(6 votes)
- I was wondering about when it was stated that diabetes is a modifiable risk, is that strictly for those that its self induced or if watched carefully it can be considered a modifiable risk for those born with it. Or would those who happen to be born with Diabetes are considered a non modifiable risk.(4 votes)
- Long term excess blood sugar causes damage to small blood vessels, which then causes damage to bigger blood vessels, nerves, and organs like the eyes and kidneys. This means that diabetes is a risk factor for coronary artery disease, but it is modifiable because we can do something to change how it contributes to risk -- because well-controlled diabetes greatly reduces the ongoing microvascular damage.(4 votes)
- What are some of the toxins in cigarette smoke that cause damage to blood vessels, and are those the same toxins that damage the lungs as well?(4 votes)
- I can answer part of that question, Kutilli. The tar in cigarettes damage your lungs, and other items in cigarettes, such as ingredients in moth balls and rat poison, damage other parts of your body, including blood vessels and mouth (you lose taste, and your teeth). Of course, this only applies to directly smoking a cigarette, not coming in contact with the smoke, but second-hand smoking (coming in contact with cigarette smoke) can damage you, just like direct smoking can.(1 vote)
- What is the reason for T- inversion(4 votes)
- If someone has history & artery has blocked .Is this possible to treat blockege without Sergey. As we can reduce risk factor by diet & exercise.(3 votes)
- What is acute heart failure and what causes it?(2 votes)
- Heart failure is the heart’s inability to pump the needed amount of blood. Basically what causes it is damage to the heart muscle, such as: infections, allergic reactions, a blood clot in your lungs, viruses that damage the heart, cardiopulmonary bypass surgery, severely irregular heartbeats, heart attack.
Hope this helps!(3 votes)
- If someone was to live with someone that smokes in the house, is inhaling the smoke as bad as smoking your self?(2 votes)
- Yep, second hand smoking has been proven to seriously affect another person's lungs.
As for me, I was around a family member that was always smoking, and after a visit to the doctor, he said that my lungs were not functioning as properly as they should have been, and that was the cause for my sudden wheezing and coughing attacks.
Better to stay away form all smoking, if possible. :D(2 votes)
- If you don't have any damaged blood vessels, would you still have a risk of getting Atherosclerosis ??(2 votes)
- Yes...endothelial dysfunction shows no visible damage (if you meant damaged blood vessels=damaged endothelium)(2 votes)
Video transcript
- So we know that coronary artery disease is when you get this
build up of fatty plaques in different places in
your coronary circulation, so, for example, I'm drawing
in bits of this plaque, right? So bits of this atherosclerotic plaque building up in different parts
of your coronary vessels, and these are going to cause
coronary artery disease, right? These are going to lead
to downstream pathologies, diseases like stable angina and acute coronary syndrome, so we know this is really bad, right? We don't really want
coronary artery disease to be happening in our bodies, so is there anything we can do about this? Is there anything that we can do to stop or prevent these plaques from building up in our arteries? And, in fact, yes, yes there
are somethings we can do, and we didn't always know that there was something we can do. Way back in the 1940s, I
believe it is, the late 1940s, there's a study done called
the Framingham Heart Study, and the Framingham Heart Study
was pretty revolutionary. It showed that there were risk factors for it developing coronary artery disease, and, so, why is that revolutionary? Well, it means there's something we could potentially do to reduce the incidence of coronary artery disease, and that's really good because coronary artery disease is the leading cause of death
of men and women in the U.S., so all this talk about risk factors. What exactly is a risk factor? Well, a risk factor is something that predisposes you to something else, so, for example, you could say that buying an iPhone six is a risk factor for not having very much
money left in your wallet, or playing ice hockey against Canadians is a risk factor for
losing the hockey game, if you're on the other team, but to bring it back to
something more relevant, something like hypertension
would be a risk factor for coronary artery disease because all of this stress that pathologically high blood
pressure puts on your vessels would predispose you to developing coronary artery disease, so the Framingham Heart Study showed us that there are two major
types of risk factors. Modifiable risk factors and
non-modifiable risk factors, and this is, actually, really important. It kind of means we could do something, we could modify something about our lives to lower our risk of
coronary artery disease, but the flip size is there
are non-modifiable things too, so no matter what we do, we can't change these
things about our lives, so let's take a look at the major ones, so what's an example of a
non-modifiable risk factor? Well, age, age is a risk factor because you can't really
change how old you are, and, so, in coronary
artery disease for men being 45 years or older sort of puts you in a higher risk bracket than being younger than that, and for women it's over 55, and it's not like 45 and 55, they're not these magic numbers that all a sudden once you turn 45, on the day of your 45th birthday, you're just more prone to
developing these plaques. It's just that by the time you reach about 45 in men and 55 in women enough time has gone by in your life for you to get a significant
amount of buildup, so, again, I want to stress
that atherosclerosis, the underlying, sort of,
plaque forming process behind coronary artery disease, that's a chronic condition. It develops over a long period of time, and, so, once you hit abut 45
years old in men, 55 in women, that's been a pretty good amount of time for the plaques to have built up, and, so, immediately, you
should have another question. I mean, if you look at what
we just written down, right? Let me highlight this for you, but we say men have a
higher risk after 45 years and females have a higher
risk after 55 years, well, that's a pretty huge difference. That's 10 years. I mean, you think back to 10 years ago, and there was no such thing as an iPhone, I can't even imagine that, but, so, 10 years is a long time, and, so, why are men
at a higher risk then? And, you know, the answer
is a bit multi factorial. There's a couple of reasons. For example, men tend to have a less healthy cholesterol profile in their blood compared to women, and it's thought that the
higher levels of estrogen that women have contribute to the better profile of
cholesterol that women have, and another interesting reason might be that studies show that women tend to listen to their doctors more when their doctors
recommend lifestyle changes, so the lower incidence
of cardiovascular disease might be a reflection of that. So, what else is non-modifiable? Well, your family history, for example. If someone in your family, a first degree relative maybe, had coronary heart disease, or any other type of heart disease, you would probably be at increased risk of also developing heart disease, and there's nothing sort
of magical about that. It's just that you'd share
a lot of genetic material, and we know that coronary heart disease has a lot of genetic
influence to its development, so one more non-modifiable one
I'll touch on is ethnicity. For example, certain ethnicities are indirectly at higher risk. People of African decent tend to have higher rates of hypertension than people of non African decent, and hypertension is a
really well characterized risk factor for development
of coronary artery disease. O.K., so those are the major
non-modifiable risk factors, but what are some of the
modifiable risk factors? I mean, we know that
coronary artery disease is not what we want. Well, what can we do about it? What exactly can we do to prevent it, or at least reduce the incidence, or reduce the development of it? What can we do? Well, there's quite a lot of
things we can do, actually. I mean, none of them will necessarily completely prevent us from
developing arteriosclerosis or atharomas, plaques, but, you know, if we know that
there's something we can do, then let's do that, so let me make some room here, and I'll do them in
different colors this time. I'll do the modifiable
ones over on this side, so high blood cholesterol levels, especially LDL, the bad cholesterol, the so called bad cholesterol. We know that a huge part
of development of atheroma, of these plaques is the
build up of cholesterol in the walls and the damaged
walls of blood vessels, right? So, it makes sense,
well if I have more LDL, if I have more of this bad cholesterol, probably more of it is going
to build up in the walls wherever there's damage, and that's what we see in the studies, so cholesterol, high
levels of LDL cholesterol is one of the key risk factors, the key modifiable risk factors. High triglycerides, or high
levels of fat, free fatty acids because high levels of
certain types of fat, and I won't get into all the details now, but high levels of certain types of fat will increase levels of other enzymes that increase plaque formation, and I know that sounds
a bit of a run around, but that's the mechanism
that we understand, and, by the way, I'm saying high levels of this, high levels of that, but what I'm meaning is in your blood, so if you have high levels
of LDL in your blood, high levels of
triglycerides in your blood, that's what I mean, so just keep that in mind. What else? High blood pressure, or hyper tension, because we know that high blood pressure will damage blood vessel walls
with sheer stress, right? The blood will sort of bang against the blood vessel wall with so much force that it causes damage to
the blood vessel wall, and that's when the LDL cholesterol gets in there and starts
the plaque buildup, right? So that's why hypertension,
high blood pressure, is a risk factor. Now here's a big one. This is probably the biggest one, and it's cigarette smoking, and you've probably heard this already. You probably know that smoking
damages your blood vessels and smoking is bad for you, but it really is really bad for you, and, so, it turns out that
actually quitting smoking is the single biggest
thing that you can do to prevent development of
coronary artery disease, to prevent plaque formation, so the reason for this, right? Is because remember the whole underlying issue in the first place is when you get damage
of the blood vessel wall, so you damage the wall, then the cholesterol can jump in there and have a big party, and create a huge plaque. Well, when you smoke a cigarette, you are injesting toxins, right? And the toxins will get into your blood, and they will directly damage
your blood vessel walls, and you know we're
talking about it in terms of it's relevance to the heart rate now, but it can happen anywhere
in your body, right? And so cigarette smoking, these toxic substances will
damage your blood vessels, and you will develop atharomas, so cigarette smoking is the
single biggest risk factor, and I know it sounds like I'm going on and on and on about this, but it really is that
important to cut that out, so that's that. So what's another big one? Another big one is diabetes, and I think that most
of us know that diabetes sort of is a disease
caused by excess sugar, excess glucose that's sort of
floating around in your blood and sort of wrecking havoc on your different vascular systems, and one of the problems
that diabetes causes is that it damages your blood vessels because what happens
is the little glucoses that are all floating around
unregulated in your blood, they bind onto the sides
of your blood vessels, and they make them stiff and damaged. A process called glycosylation, and I hate to beat a dead horse, but do you know we've talked about how the blood vessel damage
is what predisposes you, sets up coronary artery
disease and plaque formation, and it's really the same sort of process after you get that blood
vessel damage in diabetes, so these are the underlying
modifiable risk factors, right? Because there is something we can do about our blood sugar, there's something we can
do about our cholesterol, and same goes for our fats, and our blood pressure, and cigarette smoking, we can stop smoking, so these are really the underlying
modifiable risk factors, but it terms of your lifestyle, and what can you do with your lifestyle other than these dietary changes is you can increase you
level of physical activity. A reasonable level of physical activity, every week or every day, can dramatically reduce your risk of developing coronary artery disease, and that's because when
you exercise, right, when you exercise you improve the levels of glucose in your blood, and you improve your cholesterol profile, and you use up a lot of your fats, and you lower your blood pressure, and you know just going by the numbers, by the statistics here, if you were an exerciser, than you're less likely to be a smoker, and so just by getting
exercise into your week, you're all of a sudden
reducing all of these modifiable risk factors for
coronary artery disease, so if you're obese, or if you have a distinct
lack of physical activity, then all of that plays in and increases your overall risk again on top of these other modifiable risk factors, so that's really all I wanted to say about non-modifiable risk and
modifiable risk factors, but there is one more
interesting, little tidbit that I have to drop on you. One of the reasons for acute
coronary syndrome to happen is atherosclerosis, right? It's buildup of these fatty plaques, but another reason why you might get acute coronary syndrome
is due to cocaine use, cocaine or amphetamine use, so I thought I'd just touch on why because this really is
suppose to be both about coronary artery disease and
acute coronary syndrome. What cocaine can do to
your coronary vessels is it can cause them to vasospasm. Now vasospasm, what the
heck does that mean? Well, it means that it
causes your coronary arteries to clamp down and close off, and by the way I'm not
writing cocaine in white for any particular reason
in case you were wondering, just putting that out there, so that's obviously not going
to let blood through, right? So, in that way it sort
of approximates a plaque. It's similar to a plaque in that it can compromise blood flow downstream, and that's how it causes
acute coronary syndrome, so that's probably
another thing to not do.