12.3: Treatment for Cardiovascular Diseases
The best treatment for cardiovascular diseases is prevention. By living a healthy lifestyle, you can help keep your blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar levels normal and lower your risk for heart disease and heart attack.
Choose healthy habits:
- Choose healthy foods
- Maintain a healthy weight
- Exercise regularly
- Don’t smoke
Understand your own health
- Have your Cholesterol levels checked regularly
- Measure your blood pressure regularly
- Manage your blood sugar levels and control diabetes
- Go to the doctor regularly. Many of the diseases of the cardiovascular system, like blood pressure, have no symptoms, so you will not know you have it without being tested.
If you suffer from cardiovascular diseases, there are several surgeries or procedures that me be required.
Medications
There are many types and combinations of drugs used to treat coronary artery disease (CAD), and your doctor or other health care provider will decide the best treatment combination for your situation. Some of the medications available include:
- Anticoagulants: Decrease the clotting (coagulating) ability of the blood. Sometimes called “blood thinners”
- Antiplatelet agents: Keep blood clots from forming by preventing blood platelets from sticking together.
- Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme (ACE) Inhibitors: Expand blood vessels and decreases resistance thus allowing blood to flow more easily and makes the heart’s work easier or more efficient.
- Beta blockers: Decrease the heart rate and force of contraction, which lowers blood pressure and makes the heart beat more slowly and with less force.
Balloon Angioplasty
Angioplasty is a procedure to improve blood flow in coronary arteries that have become narrow or blocked by mechanically widening the artery with a balloon. A specialized catheter with an expandable tip is inserted into the blocked blood vessel. The balloon is inflated to compress the plaque material and to open the vessel to increase blood flow. Then, the balloon is deflated and retracted. A stent consisting of a specialized mesh is typically inserted at the site of occlusion to reinforce the weakened and damaged walls. Stent insertions have been routine in cardiology for more than 40 years.
Coronary Bypass Surgery
Sometimes arteries become so damaged that they cannot be healed or fixed. When this occurs, the only option is to create a new artery and bypass the damaged one, this is known as coronary bypass surgery. You might have heard of someone having a “quadruple bypass,” what they are saying is that the surgeon had to create four new blood vessels to replace four coronary arteries that were blocked.
The surgery creates a new path for blood to flow to the heart. The surgeon takes a healthy piece of vein from the leg or artery from the chest or wrist. Then the surgeon attaches it to the coronary artery, just above and below the narrowed area or blockage. This allows blood to bypass (get around) the blockage.