What is cardiovascular disease?

We read very often about cardiovascular disease, about heart failure, heart attack, stroke and many other disorders, but we don’t know for sure what is cardiovascular disease, why and how it occurs and what changes occur in our body. Next, we will try to explain what is cardiovascular disease in the society of nowadays and how much did medicine advanced in this research field.

What is cardiovascular disease

A question that scientists succeeded to answer but failed to cure.

Nowadays, when more and more people are suffering from heart disease we may wonder what is cardiovascular disease and why is it the first cause of death in most of the countries. We invest millions of dollars on research, looking and testing a lot of drugs, we even found out what is causing AIDS (and we succeeded to transform it in a „chronic” disease) and many other disease with strange names. But all the time there is a new disease, a new virus or bacteria that gives us trouble to treat and sometimes it feels that the more drugs we discover, the more diseases occur. Even so, the most frequent cause of death are
cardiovascular disease, a group of diseases that seem to be entirely understood, with lots of article and medical research, that could make some wonder what else is left to discover. The truth it is far from being so, as with the medical treatment we have at this moment we can only slow down these disease and not cure. Even the prophylaxis of cardiovascular disease is not very promising as we live in the century of unhealthy foods, McDonald’s food, alcohol consumption, smoking, stress, sedentariness and we spend all out time watching TV and working on computer.
After we established how important these diseases are, now let’s finally find out what is cardiovascular disease.

What is cardiovascular disease? A group of disorders that affect heart, brain and blood vessels.

The most frequent cardiovascular diseases:

• hypertension: high blood pressure affects both brain and heart as it can determine bleeding (stroke) or small infarcts in the brain and also determine or worsen heart failure. Beside heart and brain, hypertension also affects eyes and kidneys.
• heart valve disease: valves fail to close or open properly and in time they can cause heart failure,
• irregular heart beats can cause fainting, shortness of breath, chest pain, fatigue or even heart failure,
• other heart tissues disorders: infection, metabolic disorders that affect heart (different disorders that can determine deposits of some substances in heart tissues like iron, copper etc)
• strokes: a blood cloth can block one of the brain blood vessels and make a variable brain area to die or a blood vessel may break and let blood flow into the brain (this usually occurs in patients with hypertension or with blood vessel malformations).
• atherosclerosis: fat deposits in the blood vessels wall that in time can determine strokes, heart attack, chest pain, arterial disorder with legs pain during walking and even during rest, in advanced cases, neurologic symptoms: dizziness, fatigue, fainting, drowsiness, memory and concentration dysfunction etc.

Now that we found out what is cardiovascular disease, let’s see how is treated. As we’ve seen, it is easy to answer what is cardiovascular disease, but is difficult to treat it. Treatment has two parts and two partners: the patient and the doctor. The patient should respect a healthy diet, with no salt, fats and sweets, attend regular exercise (jogging, running or any kind of sport), no smoking or alcohol consumption, keep a normal weight, control blood pressure and blood sugar. Doctors have a large number of drugs they can use, the purpose of this treatment is to slow down the disease and treat other disorders that may worsen cardiovascular diseases like high blood pressure, diabetes, high level of fats in the blood, infections, irregular heart beats etc. It is also important to prevent other cardiovascular events from happening, that’s why antiplatelet medication like aspirin is prescribed in patients that are suffering from cardiovascular disease.
We hope this article can offer a brief answer to the question what is cardiovascular disease and why this medical problem is so important in nowadays society.