Atheista -

I featured this video before so I guess this would be a good reminder. Despite the advances in medicine sudden cardiac arrest continues to be a leading cause of death in developed and developing nations. The video gives people an idea about the dynamics of cardiac arrest the expected normal behavior of heart tissue before, during and after  hypoxic insult.

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We are constantly bombarded by advertisements that keep conditioning the minds of parents and would-be parents that certain substances in a baby formula could improve the IQ of children. The new buzzwords in the industry now are  the fatty acids DHA (docosahexanoic acid) and ARA (arachidonic acid). Plenty of studies have claimed that there is a significant improvement that could be attributed to having these supplements artificially added to the diet. Unfortunately for the multinational corporations behind these milk brands, no self-respecting pediatrician will back them. Why? This is because even in their own commissioned studies, breastfeeding still produces far better results in their already tailor-made criterion. Continue Reading »

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Despite the high number of mortality and morbidity that Filipinos experience first-hand, people are still in the dark when it comes to concerns related to cardiovascular disease. For instance, most people would go see a heart doctor or a cardiologist if they show sudden spikes in blood pressure readings. Physiologically speaking though, hypertensive disorders would fall more into the nephrologists’ (kidney specialists) side of the court. Hypertension can potentially cause problems in the heart in chronic cases because the heart has to work against an increasingly steep pressure gradient, but in the end, the heart pathology is a mere secondary effect and hypertension is rarely borne out of a cardiomyopathologic etiology.

Most people would know that the heart is the pump that sends out oxygenated blood from the lungs to the peripheral structures of the body – i.e. everything else. All structures in the body need nourishment from the blood and the heart itself is no exception. We’ve been hearing the word atherosclerosis a lot lately because it has become one of the more epidemiologically-abundant medical phenomena of our time. As medicine improves and as the life span increases, we’re now seeing how the body reacts to a prolonged high-fat and high-cholesterol diet. Atherosclerosis is the narrowing of blood vessels due to the formation of plaques on the surface of blood vessels. Narrowed blood vessels easily translates to less oxygenation and as if that wasn’t bad enough, the plaques could rupture and cause the blood to clot. This clot could potentially case myocardial infarction or cardiac ischemia. Cardiac cell death can lead to many bad things for the patient – the most grave of course is this condition we call death.

My family has a strong history of heart disease. Atherosclerosis doesn’t limit you to dying of a simple heart attack. The plaques could also break off and cause a stroke in some other part of the body – the worst case scenarios would be the brain and the lungs.

Atherosclerosis may or may not present with symptoms. My Dad had a 95% obstructed artery, but he never experienced chest pains. An electrocardiomyogram showed that his heart was already exhibiting arrhythmia and could have had a heart attack any moment. Fortunately, he was seen by a competent doctor and ablation was done via percutaneous transfemoral coronary angioplasty.

There is plenty to learn about our hearts and how we should take care of it. Of course, I can’t expect everyone to just pick up Harrisson’s Internal Medicine or Netter’s Atlas of Anatomy all of a sudden. It’s a good thing that there are non-threatening, well-written and informative websites out there that discusses the ins and outs of medical conditions.

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