What Is Cholesterol?

I. What is cholesterol?

Cholesterol  is a fat-like complex, most manufactured by the liver. Our bodies need a certain amount of cholesterol to maintain normal function, but too much is harmful. Every cell in the body contains cholesterol. It is the manufacture of important hormones and vitamins essential substances. Cholesterol and lipoproteins need to be transported to various parts of the body. There are two lipoprotein cholesterol transport, namely low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and high density lipoprotein (HDL).

Low-density lipoprotein cholesterol is the culprit causing blood clots, is considered “bad” cholesterol. As for the high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, as cholesterol within the blood vessels to remove, it is considered “good” cholesterol.

II. Where cholesterol come from?

Body’s cells, especially liver cells, can produce cholesterol to maintain normal function, such as the manufacture of hormones and vitamins and so on.

In addition, cholesterol can be absorbed from food. Cholesterol content in different foods, such as Westerners like to eat animal foods, like whole milk, eggs and food oils, are of high cholesterol food. Fat, especially saturated fat, cholesterol levels can lead to even more enhanced. Usually saturated fat from animal food more than poultry and fish. On the other hand, from plant foods are mostly unsaturated fatty acids.

III. What is the relationship of cholesterol and heart disease?

When the body than the body needs cholesterol, it will accumulate in the blood vessel wall, causing blood vessels gradually harden and narrow, but on the surface, the body for a long time does not have any symptoms.

After years and years, deposition of cholesterol in the blood vessel walls, blocking blood vessels becoming more serious, will make the blood flow to vital organs slowly reduced. Therefore, when organs from the blood can not get enough oxygen and nutrients, will be very easy to necrotic.

If the supply of nutrient blood vessels blocking the heart, it is easy to cause coronary heart disease, including angina, myocardial ischemia, myocardial infarction; If the supply of nutrients the brain blood vessel blockage, will be a stroke.

IV. Heart disease common?

Heart disease is the world’s major diseases leading to death one, but if compliance with physician instructions, good diet, exercise control, the risk of heart disease can be greatly reduced.

1.            To prevent high blood pressure

2.            Is the movement to maintain

3.            A regular exercise schedule

4.            To maintain the concentration of cholesterol in moderate

High cholesterol is not uncommon, integrated all over the world statistics show that about fifteen to twenty-five percent of the people, cholesterol concentration above 240mg/dl, in other words, they get the opportunity to greatly increase coronary heart disease.

Therefore, high cholesterol, said health is a red light, are greatly increased risk of coronary heart disease. But the frightening thing is, even if high cholesterol, most people have no symptoms. Therefore, regular check-ups and keep the concentration of cholesterol in the moderate concentration of cholesterol is very important.

V. Normal cholesterol levels, reference values

Normal reference value of cholesterol is about 110 ~ 200mg/dl, if the 200 ~ 239 mg / dl are at high risk are close to the edge, and cholesterol concentration greater than 240 mg / dl, compared with high-risk range.

Cholesterol Level Recommendations
< 200 mg/dl <200 mg / dl Belongs to the ideal range
200~ 239 mg/dl 200 ~ 239 mg / dl Close to the edge of high risk, ask physicians about the diet instructions. Recommended cholesterol levels checked once a year. Has been suffering from a heart attack or if there are two or more risk factors, then it should belong to the high risk range.
> 240 mg/dl A high-risk range, three to six weeks, remember to check again to physicians. If still so, physicians need to do to comply with instructions.

VI. Easily lead to heart disease risk factors

    Hypertension
    Weight seriously overweight (overweight more than thirty percent)
    Smoking (more than ten per day)
    High-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) is too low
    Someone in the family had suffered from coronary heart disease before age 55
    Diabetes
    Suffered from heart disease or vascular disease
    Men

VII. How to control cholesterol?

Lower cholesterol levels, can reduce fat deposition in the vessel wall, thereby reducing the risk of heart attack. According to the study, adults with high cholesterol, cholesterol levels, reduced by 1%, 2% lower risk of coronary heart disease.

Here are several ways to help you lower your cholesterol:

    Maintain a proper diet
    Weight control
    Proper exercise

VIII. How to maintain through diet moderate cholesterol levels?

Diet on cholesterol levels remain moderate, and increase heart health, it is very important. Only foods of animal origin contain cholesterol, such as beef, eggs, cheese and other dairy products, cholesterol in food causes the body to increase cholesterol, saturated fat, which is mainly caused by coronary heart disease. American Heart Association recommends that the heat obtained from the fatty foods, daily intake should not exceed 30% of total calories, while the daily intake of cholesterol should not exceed 300mg.

IX. Should be avoided to the types of fat foods?

Fat can be divided into three categories: saturated, polyunsaturated, monounsaturated fat. Avoid eating saturated fat, use monounsaturated fat, or multiple. Moderate consumption of multiple or monounsaturated fat, help to reduce the concentration of cholesterol in the body. A variety of foods contain different types of fat, so must know what kind of food, the highest content of saturated fat.

Saturated fat Oil, whether animal or vegetable oils, where the normal room temperature into a solid contains a high amount of saturated fat. Common are meat fat, butter, cream margarine and non-dairy products, coconut oil, “hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated” oil and so on.

Unsaturated fat Unsaturated fats come mainly from plants, can basically be divided into polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat categories.

Polyunsaturated fat Polyunsaturated fat in the normal room temperature liquid. Are: safflower seed oil, cotton oil, sunflower seed oil, soybean oil, corn oil, nuts and seeds, fish fat, this fat calorie intake calories a day should not exceed ten percent.

Monounsaturated fat This type of fat in normal room temperature, but also in liquid form, the intake of calories a day should not exceed ten percent of total. Generally include: olive oil, peanut oil, Canoia oil.

X. Conclusion

If the cholesterol level higher than the normal reference range, periodically check the concentration of cholesterol, and consult a physician diet and life habits of the instructions actually make food, life control, for example, both the amount of fat intake, the type must be restrained to maintain the ideal weight, controlling blood pressure, continuous abstinence, etc., so that it can be suffering from vascular obstruction, greatly reduce the chance of coronary heart disease.

You can find recepies from American Heart Association here.

Causes of Heart Disease

Causes of Heart Disease

Coronary artery disease, the most common form of cardiovascular disease, is one of the leading causes of death today. But thanks to many studies involving thousands of patients, researchers that have been able to shortlist certain factors that are the Causes of Heart Disease in a person. These are called risk factors. These risk factors contribute to two categories: major and contributing. The major Causes of Heart Disease are:

High Blood Pressure (Hypertension): High blood pressure increases your risk of heart disease, heart attack, and stroke. Though other risk factors can lead to high blood pressure, you can have it without having other risk factors. Blood pressure can vary with activity and with age. A healthy adult who is resting generally has a systolic pressure reading between 120 and 130 and a diastolic pressure reading between 80 and 90.

High Blood Cholesterol: this is another risk factor that causes of Heart Disease is high blood cholesterol. Cholesterol is a fat-like substance carried in your blood. This is found in all of your body cells. Your liver produces all of the cholesterol your body needs to form cell membranes and to make certain hormones. Extra cholesterol enters your body when you eat foods that come from animals

Diabetes: Heart problems are the leading cause of death among people with diabetes, especially in the case of adult-onset. If you know that you have diabetes, you should already be under a doctor's care, because good control of blood sugar levels can reduce your risk. If you think you may have diabetes but not sure, you must consult your doctor for tests.

Obesity and Overweight: Extra weight is thought to lead to increased total cholesterol levels. High blood pressure, increased risk of coronary artery disease. Obesity increases your chances of developing other risk factors for example, heart disease, especially high blood pressure, diabetes and high blood cholesterol.

Smoking: Most people realize that cigarette and tabacco smoking increases your risk of lung cancer, but fewer realize that it is one of the causes of Heart Disease and also other peripheral vascular disease.

Heredity: Heart disease tends to run in families. For example, if your siblings or parents had a heart or circulatory problem before the age of 55. But then you are at greater risk of heart disease than someone who does not have complains for heart disease in their family history.

Age: Older age is a risk factor for heart disease. In fact, about 4 out of every 5 deaths occur due to heart diseases that occur in people older than 65.

In addition to this, there are also certain contributing factor that enhances the causes of Heart Disease. They are: Stress, Sex hormones, Birth control pills and Alcohol. Stress is considered an important contributing risk factor for heart disease. The effects of behavior habits, emotional stress, and socioeconomic status on the risk of heart disease and heart attack have not been proven

Decompensated heart failure

Decompensated heart failure is the term used to define heart incapacity of pumping enough blood in the main arteries, according to the organism needs. What distinguishes decompensated heart failure from a compensated heart failure is the fact that defensive mechanisms are not efficient anymore and the blood amount delivered to the tissues is no longer sufficient, which determines a variety of symptoms as we are going to reveal next.
How do you know you have a decompensated heart failure and if u need to go to the hospital? Decompensated heart failure has different manifestations, as following:

•  when the left heart is inefficient, blood will stagnate into the heart chambers forcing them to enlarge or increase the number of muscle fibers in order to increase cardiac force; this is a defensive mechanism, which will compensate for a while the inefficient function of the heart. Once this mechanism is no longer able to control the situation, blood will stagnate in the lungs, increasing the pressure in the pulmonary vessels and from this point on, pulmonary edema (accumulation of water in the lungs) and pulmonary hypertension may occur. All these manifestations are a sign that the heart can no longer compensate its diminished function, so we are facing a decompensated heart failure.
•  in right heart insufficiency, cardiac muscle won’t be able to pump blood into the pulmonary arteries, so the blood will flow back in the venous system, determining accumulation of water in different tissues (lower limbs, abdomen-ascites, pleural space).

In clinical practice, people with decompensated heart failure will experience important shortness of breath, being unable to breathe while lying (a condition known as orthopnoea), blue color of the lips and limbs extremities, fatigue, palpitations or rapid heart beats, incapacity of performing daily activities. In more advanced cases, hypotension, fainting, ischemia of lower limbs, stroke or renal failure may occur, these manifestations being the consequence of the low blood flow in the arteries that feed the brain, kidney, or limbs.

What is the cause for decompensated heart failure?

There are many causes for decompensated heart failure, the most important ones are the following:

•  hypertension-if patients don’t follow the treatment, high blood pressure will increase the labor of an already weak heart, making it impossible to accomplish body needs,
•  salt intake-will favor water accumulation in the body, increasing blood volume and requesting a higher cardiac labor,
• infections: respiratory infections, heart wall infections like myocarditis,
• heart attacks, arrhythmia,
• weight gain is common cause of decompensated heart failure,
• patients that no longer respect their heart medication,
• patients that continue to smoke, drink alcohol, with high levels of blood lipids etc.

What are the steps to follow in decompensated heart failure ? People in this condition must be admitted to hospital, carefully watched, investigated for different conditions that might have provoked decompensated heart failure and follow a well established therapy (diuretics and cardiotonic medication will be needed in order to eliminate the overload of water and increase cardiac muscle force).
People with heart failure will have a different number of hospital admissions, followed by „free” periods of time, when the symptoms will be stable. However, the compliance to medical recommendations will determine how fast this disease will evolve, together with the other conditions we enumerated above. Despite the correct treatment and compliance of the patient, heart failure will progress until the only option left is cardiac transplant, but the speed of this evolution can be controlled by avoiding the conditions that favor heart failure to decompensate.

Please call your doctor to find out mode about decompensated heart failure.

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.

Heart pain in women

Heart pain in women: a symptom that begins to trouble most frequently after menopause, when due to the absence of  estrogen hormones, women lose their „natural” protection against cardiovascular events. According to the studies made among patients with heart attack, heart pain in women is not a hallmark symptom as it is in men. This means that during a heart attack, heart pain in women is less likely to occur and we must pay attention to other signs and symptoms if we don’t want to miss a heart disorder. Although women lose their protection against cardiovascular disease after menopause, estrogen replacement must be indicated only in well selected cases, because this treatment can determine breast or endometrial cancer, blood cloths and stroke etc.

How can estrogen hormones prevent heart pain in women?

It is simple. Estrogen has an important role in lipid metabolism: these hormones decrease the level of LDL-cholesterol and increase the HDL cholesterol (also called „the healthy” cholesterol as it protects against atherosclerosis). Estrogens tend to decrease serum cholesterol concentrations and to increase serum triglyceride concentrations. The overall effect of these changes, together with the effects on blood vessels, is to protect against atherosclerosis and heart pain in women before menopause. As atherosclerosis is the most important cause for heart attacks and chronic heart ischemia (heart disease caused by insufficient oxygenation of the heart tissues, which occurs when blood vessels are blocked by atherosclerosis) it is clear now why estrogen is so important and how can this hormone prevent heart pain in women.

Heart pain in women, what does it mean?

Heart pain in women or chest pain are very often among old patients and challenge the doctor to consider a lot of differential diagnosis, although sometimes it is almost impossible to separate them. For example, a pathology of the spine that presses nerve roots can determine an intense pain, sometimes unbearable, radiating towards the abdomen or chest and can easily mimic a heart pain. An esophagitis with burning sensation in the chest, can be mistaken as a heart symptom, but it responds well to the medication used in ulcer treatment and the duration of symptoms is variable. Heart pain in women doest mean necessary that it is a heart attack, sometimes it is caused by a heart muscle infection or disorder. Other causes for heart pain are abnormal dilated blood vessels called aneurism or chest trauma. In some patients, during heart attack, the pain is felt in the upper part of the abdomen and it can be confused with a stomach or liver disease (like ulcer, gastritis etc.).

How do we manage heart pain?

Heart pain it is always a very disturbing symptom, described by patients as a sensation of pressure on the chest or constriction, but sometimes, associated with palpitations (irregular heart beats), shortness of breath, fatigue, sweating, agitation or even fainting. In conclusion, heart pain in women and men  can be treated with beta-blockers (drugs that increase heart tissues oxygenation, an example of such a drug is metoprolole), calcium channels blockers (make heart blood vessels larger; e.g. amlodipine) or the well known nitroglycerin.