American Heart Association amongst most common ailments describes Arrhythmia, Cardiac Arrest, Cholesterol , Diabetes and Heart Attack as few major reasons for over 80 percent of all heart ailments in the urban population today.
Patients often vary in their medical sophistication and ability to recall facts. They report medical history which in turn should be well grounded and substantiated whenever possible to arrive at a reasonable and most accurate diagnosis. The social history also can provide important insights into the types of diseases and more than often it reveals risk factors for common disorders, such as coronary heart disease, hypertension, and asthma.
From an epidemiologic perspective, there is no obvious level of blood pressure that defines hypertension. In adults, there is a continuous, incremental risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and renal disease across levels of both systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
In a meta-analysis involving almost 1 million participants indicate that ischemic heart disease mortality, stroke mortality, and mortality from other vascular causes are directly related to the height of the blood pressure, beginning at 115/75 mmHg, without evidence of a threshold. “Cardiovascular disease risk doubles for every 20-mmHg increase in systolic and 10-mmHg increase in diastolic pressure. Among older individuals, systolic blood pressure and pulse pressure are more powerful predictors of cardiovascular disease than is diastolic blood pressure”.
You would be surprised to note that, ” There is no uniform agreement as to which antihypertensive drugs should be given for initial therapy.”
Most treatments for hypertension are based upon use of medications such as:
- Thiazide-type diuretics
- Angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors/angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs)
- Calcium channel blockers
- Beta blockers
Chronic kidney disease (CKD) and heart disease are closely associated. This is because having kidney failure creates certain imbalances in the body, which, if untreated or ignored, can affect the health of blood vessels and the heart. These are additional to the standard risks factors for heart disease, which all members of our community face.
Keeping your heart healthy is possible by rstly reducing the standard risk factors for developing heart disease and secondly, by reducing the extra risk factors for heart disease that exist because of kidney failure. This can be achieved by adherence to your prescribed medication, diet, uid intake and exercise. Such measures should be taken from the earliest stages of kidney failure. This will help to prevent irreversible damage.
END YOUR ILLNESS 