Archive for Heart
The Basics of Heart, Blood and Circulation in Human Body
Posted by: | CommentsThe heart is situated on the left side of the chest, between the lungs and above the diaphragm, and is protected by the ribs. Its strong muscular pumping action works in two directions. It pushes dark-red, de-oxygenated blood to the lungs to pick up oxygen and get rid of carbon dioxide, and then pumps this bright-red, newly oxygenated blood round the body.
The right side of the heart is the pump which sends blood to the lungs to be oxygenated and the left side is the pump which supplies the whole body with oxygenated blood. Each separate pump has two chambers, an atrium above which receives blood and a ventricle below which sends it out of the heart again. Between each atrium and ventricle, and between each ventricle and outflow blood vessel, is a valve which prevents the blood flowing in the wrong direction.
In a healthy person, the heart beats regularly and spontaneously throughout life. The heart rate can be altered by such factors as emotion, food, drugs, exercise, altitude and certain illnesses. Normally the beating of the heart is unnoticeable, but sometimes it seems to thump in the chest. With each beat, the whole heart contracts because of a shortening and tightening of its muscle fibres. The two atria contract before the two ventricles, so the atria push blood into the ventricles in time for them to squeeze it out, as they contract, into the outflow vessels. Any turbulence in the flow of blood creates a noise called a murmur.
The blood vessels carrying blood away from the heart are called arteries. All the arteries except the pulmonary artery carry oxygenated blood. The nearer an artery is to the tissue it supplies, the smaller it becomes. These tiny branches are called arterioles and they eventually become minute capillaries which form a network around the cells and allow oxygen, nutrients and various other substances carried by the blood to diffuse out into the tissue fluid and into the cells.
The blood vessels carrying blood to the heart are called veins. All the veins except the pulmonary vein carry de-oxygenated blood. The nearer the heart, the larger the blood vessels: blood flows from capillaries to venules to veins and back to the right atrium. Veins tend to be larger than arteries and have thinner walls with less muscle in them.
The pulmonary artery carries de-oxygenated blood from the heart to the lungs, where carbon dioxide is removed and oxygen added. The oxygenated blood is then returned to the heart by the pulmonary vein, to be circulated round the body.
Nutrients from the food we eat are taken up from the digestive system into the blood and circulated to the tissues. Waste products are carried to the kidneys, which filter and remove many of them. Drugs and other chemicals entering the bloodstream after being eaten, breathed in. or taken in through the skin are also carried round and used or eventually removed. Hormones from the endocrine glands are taken by the blood to their various sites of action.
The Basics of How to Parent Your Boys: Fortify His Heart, Don’t Thicken His Skin
Posted by: | CommentsMany people believe that the best way to arm their son against verbal attack and disappointment is to thicken his skin, to get him to ‘toughen up’. They achieve this in three ways. Some make a habit of speaking harshly to their son, just to get him used to being hurt, to create an immunity to it. Others constantly tell their son, because his emotions make him vulnerable to pain, he should deny or distance himself from them. Most commonly, people advise boys to hit back.
Parents
* Build his inner strength: trust him; see him as competent; let him have some autonomy over his life; respect his view of the World and tell him you love him
* If he’s in trouble, help him; don’t put him down or say: ‘Why did you get yourself into this mess?’
* Encourage him to follow and trust his instincts; ‘encourage’ means to give courage, to ‘enhearten’
* Give him assertive things to say to people who hurt others, like: ‘I don’t know why you need to say/do these things that hurt others’ or ‘I don’t have to listen to you’ and advise him to turn away; discuss possible strategies
* Constantly monitor the different ways in which you talk to boys and girls
* Ensure that you don’t speak more harshly to boys than to girls, believing that they are tougher and can ‘take it’
* Don’t fall victim to expressing stereotypical views about girls or boys
A far better way to protect him is to strengthen him on the inside -his emotions and belief in himself. The other route not only does great damage to a boy’s self-esteem and self-understanding in the process, it also cuts him off from his essential self. Suits of emotional armor stop feelings coming out as well as going in, and therefore offer no long-term help with managing relationships.
The Basics of Perimenopause – HRT and Your Heart
Posted by: | CommentsWomen with a family history of heart disease may find themselves buffeted by conflicting information about hormone replacement therapy and heart protection. I want to emphasize here that when it comes to protecting your heart, HRT needs to be weighed as one of a range of options you have. A family history of heart disease is one factor to consider in evaluating the benefits of HRT, evidence shows that HRT can reduce the incidence of heart disease by as much as 30 to 50 percent. But in our forties the tools at our disposal to strengthen and protect our hearts certainly aren’t limited to medication. I prefer to aim for the overall goal of good health and resilience and do what we can do now, on our own, to achieve it without medical intervention.
Perimenopause is a time to begin anew, to make a strong commitment to taking better care of ourselves than we ever have before. A very important aspect of your self-care is paying attention to what your heart is telling you. It’s true that men and women who report cardiac symptoms are often treated very differently by the health care system, but it’s also true that women themselves often dismiss signals of heart trouble. If you have any concern about a possible cardiac symptom, you owe it to yourself to be sure that this symptom is fully explored. And you may have to be assertive in insisting that it be checked out, if your health care provider seems reluctant to do so or if he or she wants to attribute it to anxiety without any futher exploration. In other words, you may have to take the lead in educating your health care provider about the risks of heart disease in women.
The American Heart Association lists these warning signs of a heart attack:
- Uncomfortable pressure, fullness, squeezing, or pain is felt in the center of the chest, lasting more than a few minutes.
- The pain may spread to the shoulders, neck, or arms.
- Chest discomfort with lightheadedness, fainting, sweating, nausea, or shortness of breath may also occur.
If you have pain in your chest radiating into your left arm; tightness in your chest accompanied by shortness of breath; or palpitations, contact your health care provider right away. Note that palpitations can also be a symptom of perimenopause. Some perimenopausal women say their heart pounds abnormally hard or fast when they are having a hot flash, while others have palpitations that are not connected to hot flashes. Again, I want to underscore the importance of not making any assumptions about these symptoms. Talk them over with your health care provider and ask to have the appropriate investigation to rule out a heart problem.
Women who are affected by cardiovascular disease have a less favorable prognosis than men, for a host of reasons. In the past, the medical community tended to interpret danger signs differently for men and women, although this is slowly changing. Still, palpitations in women are frequently attributed to anxiety, while in men they are viewed as a more serious sign of potential heart disease. A more complete diagnostic workup will usually be done on a man who reports chest pain than on a comparable woman. The medical community is beginning to pay closer attention to signs of heart disease in women, a long overdue change mat women in our age group can take credit for because we have insisted upon being heard.
If a woman is incorrectly diagnosed as having anxiety, however, when heart disease is the real culprit, her treatment will be delayed or inappropriate. By the time the problem is correctly identified, she will probably have more advanced coronary disease than her male counterpart. Delaying treatment for coronary disease lessens the opportunity for effective intervention. Again, if you experience the warning signs of a heart attack, there are two rules to heed: get medical help immediately, and insist that a heart attack be ruled out. Honoring and respecting yourself means listening to your body when it is talking to you.
The Female Heart cites sobering statistics on women who have heart attacks:
- Thirty-nine percent of all women heart attack victims will die within the first year of the attack, versus 31 percent of all men.
- A woman is twice as likely as a man to die within the first sixty days of a heart attack.
- After a first heart attack, a woman is twice as likely as a man to have a second heart attack.
These statistics can be alarming; especially for those of us whose mothers or fathers have had heart attacks. But you don’t have to feel like you may suddenly be blindsided by a heart attack, there is a lot you can do to keep your heart healthy so you don’t find yourself facing those post-heart attack odds. For example, smoking not only causes lung cancer and emphysema but also increases the risk of heart attack. You can cut your risk of heart disease by stopping smoking, exercising regularly (women who exercise regularly are three times less likely to have hearts disease than those who don’t), minimizing your stress level, and paying attention to your diet.
The Basics of Perimenopause – Relationship Between Estrogen and the Healthy Heart
Posted by: | CommentsAmong the hundreds of beneficial effects that estrogen has in the body, this key hormone protects the heart by keeping the lining of the veins and arteries slippery and free of plaque buildup, so that blood can move freely through them. Plaque (like the plaque that builds up on teeth if we don’t brush them) takes the form of granular, sand like particles, and in our blood these particles can attach themselves to the sides of veins and arteries if those surfaces are rough.
Plaque-filled artery and vein walls are something like a plugged-up garden hose. If you ran chocolate syrup through your garden hose every day, the syrup would eventually stick to the sides and harden. After a while the opening in the hose would be too small to let anything through. In the bloodstream estrogen prevents plaque from getting a stronghold and sticking to vein and artery walls, which then could result in narrower openings that restrict blood flow.
Estrogen also impacts on cholesterol. We’ve heard the word cholesterol for years now, but what exactly is it? It’s a waxy, fatlike substance found in the blood. Not all cholesterol is the same, as you may know. “Good” cholesterol is called HDL, and it’s considered good because it transports cholesterol and other lipids (fatlike substances) from the body. The “bad” cholesterol is called LDL, and it has a negative impact because it delivers lipids to body tissues.
The ratio between HDL and LDL is extremely important. We want to have a high level of HDL in relation to LDL. A good HDL-to-LDL ratio is 3 to 1, according to Dr. Legato’s book, the female Heart. Estrogen helps keep the HDL high and the LDL low.
Your weight, family history, and ethnicity have some bearing on the health of your heart. For example, if your father had a heart attack before age 56 or your mother had a heart attack before age 60, your risk of heart disease increases. Carrying around extra pounds also places you in a higher risk category, particularly if your weight is 20 to 30 percent higher than the acceptable range for your height. If you have a history of heart disease in your family, you have more reason to be concerned about your heart than a friend who doesn’t have the same kind of family history.
Mary lost her father to heart disease fifteen years earlier, when he was only 55. A successful businesswoman, she attributes many of her achievements to the work ethic her father demonstrated and to the guidance he gave her when she was first starting out in the work world. Yet when perimenopausal mood changes and loss of libido started to interfere with her life at 42, she hadn’t stopped to consider that heart disease could potentially be another part of her father’s legacy, it simply hadn’t occurred to her.
Mary is certainly not in any immediate danger, her cholesterol, blood pressure, and triglyceride levels are all within normal ranges. But I felt it was essential that Mary take a proactive approach to minimize the possibility of an unwelcome inheritance of heart disease. I reassured her that history wouldn’t necessarily repeat itself, but I also reminded her that her choices today about what she ate, how she took care of her body’s fitness, and how much stress was a driving force in her life would have a lot to do with her health outcomes in the years ahead.
The Basics of Perimenopause – Planning Ahead for Healthy Heart, Bones, and Breasts
Posted by: | CommentsOnly recently has preparation become a watchword in women’s health. The generations of women who came before us didn’t start thinking about steps they could take toward having a healthy pregnancy until they became pregnant. Now, we advocate that women begin to prepare their bodies for pregnancy a full year before they would like to conceive by improving their diet, exercising, and taking essential vitamins. The same is true for perimenopause: whether you are at the beginning, middle, or end of your forties, the time is right to think about making your mature years healthy and enjoyable.
Most women are no strangers to planning ahead for milestones in our lives. We’ve picked out wedding and bridesmaids’ dresses in anticipation of getting married, polished our resumes before graduation, studied the want ads in anticipation of getting a new job, and decorated nurseries while waiting for babies to be born. Perimenopause is another time in our lives when preparation now pays big dividends later.
I’m going to review the healthy steps you can take to protect your heart, bones, and breasts during perimenopause. I’ll take you through a calm discussion of the risk factors for disease and what you can do to minimize them. Since women are living longer than ever now (our average life expectancy is nearly 80 years) and are in much better health than previous generations, you want to do everything possible to establish good health for yourself in the coming years, judge your risks, and make solid, carefully thought-out choices based on your individual needs.
Protecting Your Heart
I’m going to start with an overview of how estrogen impacts the heart. Up until the beginning of perimenopause, when our bodies start producing less estrogen, women have a distinct advantage over our male counterparts as far as the health of our hearts is concerned. Women have fewer cardiovascular problems early in life, probably because the “estrogen edge” helps keep our veins and arteries in better shape. But that changes as we get older, when heart disease becomes the leading cause of death among women.
In her book The Female Heart, Marianne J. Legato, M.D., observes that by age 60, women’s risk of heart disease is equal to men’s. After age 65, heart disease kills more women than men, nearly half a million each year. Research data show and I certainly observe this in my clinic that the majority of women mistakenly believe that cancer poses a greater threat to their health than heart disease. In reality, heart disease claims more women’s lives each year than any other disease, including breast, ovarian, and lung cancer combined. I cite this statistic not to sound an alarmist note but to focus on opportunities we have during perimenopause to pay equal attention to our cardiovascular health.