Heart Disease

What Causes Heart Disease

When you are born, your arteries are clean, open and elastic.

Then something happens that causes damage to your blood vessel walls, which exposes the underlying connective tissue and the collagen.

That damage could be caused by many factors, such as the wrong type of diet, high blood pressure, smoking and lack of antioxidants.

When the platelets in the blood come into contact with the collagen, they trigger a natural repair mechanism that starts to form clots.

The immune cells that rush in to repair the damage do so as part of an inflammatory process that actually damages blood vessels further, thickens the blood and contributes to the formation of blood clots.

This process causes a proliferation of endothelial cells lining the arteries, and fatty streaks appear.

These are formed by oxidized cholesterol, immune cell debris and calcium salts.

Gradually these streaks are transformed into plaque, or atheroma - fatty scar tissue, which narrows the artery and reduces elasticity, eventually reducing blood flow through the vessel.

This process is known as atherosclerosis and is what causes heart disease to develop.

If the clot, or thrombus, becomes large enough, it can block off blood flow, suffocating large patches of cardiac muscle, causing what we know as heart attack, or myocardial infarction.

The severity of the heart attack depends on how reduced the blood flow is.

In acute myocardial infarction, the supply of oxygen is so severely reduced that the region of the heart muscle may die (necrosis) within an hour or so and, as a result, the activity of the whole heart may be severely threatened.

Pains in the chest that come on during exercise, over-eating and stress are early warning signs that the blood supply to the arteries of the heart is restricted, and are known as angina pectoris.

The clot or thrombus may also sometimes break away from its anchor point and form a mobile embolus (thromboembolism).

A freely moving embolus may partially or completely plug a smaller vessel as it flows downstream and can result in a gradual or sudden blockage of any blood vessel: if it's in the heart, it's called heart attack, if it's in the lungs it's called pulmonary embolism and if it's in the brain it's called a stroke - all potentially life-threatening events.

So what causes heart disease is also the cause of other serious cardiovascular problems.