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Heart Disease - Overview, Symptoms and Causes
contents
- Anatomy of the heart
- The heart valves
- heart disease
- Symptoms of heart disease
- Coronary heart disease
- Signs of a heart attack
- heart failure
- Myocarditis
- The cardiogenic shock
- Arrhythmia
- high blood pressure
- Causes of heart disease
- Congenital heart defects
- Error in cardiac emergencies
- The heart in myth and history
- Egypt - The heart in the balance
- The heart in ancient China
- The heart sacrifice of the Aztecs
- The pulse of God
- The biological heart
- The symbolic heart
- Modern heart medicine
Anatomy of the heart
A heart weighs about 300 grams for a man and 260 grams for a woman. It is located in the middle of the chest, to the left and right of the sternum, framed by the lungs, ending at the front of the breastbone, at the back of the air and esophagus and at the base of the diaphragm. The apex extends to about the left nipple.
The heart consists of two atria and two chambers separated by valves and partitions. (Image: lom123 / fotolia.com) The heart is divided into a right and left half of the heart, which are separated by the heart septum. Both halves of the heart each contain two chambers, one the atrium, ie the atrium, and the other the main chamber. The heart wall lying around it consists of the heart inner skin, the heart muscle and the heart outer skin.
Through the atria, the blood flows back into the heart, then it goes on into the main chambers. Here are the main pumps of the heart and pump the blood through an artery again into the bloodstream. The heart chambers can be closed with heart valves and consist of heart skin.
The heart valves
The heart valves organize blood transport in the cardiovascular system as biological valves. They open and close so that the blood can only flow in one direction.
heart disease
The heart and the cardiovascular system can be damaged in many ways. However, three causes underlie most heart problems: constricted coronary arteries, disorders of the heart rhythm and heart muscle weakness.
Symptoms of heart disease
As different as the heart disease is, some symptoms are common. These include chest pain, radiating back and arms, rapid heartbeat, chest tightness, difficulty breathing, loss of power, weakness and fatigue.
Tachycardia, chest tightness and severe fatigue are often important indications of heart disease. (Image: Robert Kneschke / fotolia.com) Coronary heart disease
Coronary heart disease (CHD) refers to narrowed coronary arteries. By narrowing the risk of heart attack increases massively, because this arises when a coronary vessel closes completely. Then no blood can flow into the heart, and part of the heart muscle dies.
Acutely even more dangerous, however, is sudden cardiac death. If no more blood enters the heart, the heart rhythm stops and the result is a ventricular fibrillation.
Today, a heart attack can be treated, doctors then open the coronary arteries with catheters, and drugs dissolve blood clots. Thus, cardiologists not only prevent sudden cardiac death, but also the long-term consequences that result when the heart muscle dies.
In angina pectoris, the vessels that supply the heart muscle are severely restricted. When strained, the blood vessels can no longer supply enough oxygen to the heart muscle. Areas in the heart muscle get up to 20 minutes no more blood. The consequences are a typical heart piercing, chest tightness and shortness of breath. Those affected are treated with nitroglycerin spray and need to rest. If the number of heartbeats now drops during rest, enough blood is left to supply the muscle.
Signs of a heart attack
A heart attack is often manifested by pain around the sternum and the left half of the breast. These last more than 5 minutes. But beware: An infarct may also trigger pain in other areas of the chest, even in the neck, left arm or back - or in women especially in the upper abdomen. There are even heart attacks that are not preceded by pain.
A typical sign of a heart attack is sudden onset of massive, lasting more than five minutes of pain behind the sternum and on the left side of the chest. (Image: Kzenon / fotolia.com) heart failure
Heart failure does not allow the heart to pump enough blood into the body. This disease can be chronic or acute. An acute heart failure must be treated immediately because it can lead to a fatal heart attack or a stroke.
Causes include chronic hypertension, heart valve defects or coronary heart disease, but also arteriosclerosis and myocarditis. These infections trigger viruses as well as bacteria or parasites.
A left heart weakness stems from the fact that less and less blood enters the circulation. Therefore, the blood builds up in the lungs, the consequences are pulmonary hypertension and edema. Respiratory distress, cardiac asthma, pulmonary edema and hasty breathing are typical (snap-breathing).
Right heart failure usually follows a left heart failure. Now the blood builds up in the right half of the heart. The jugular veins are jammed, as are the liver, spleen and kidneys. Patients are gaining weight, needing more water and edema.
Myocarditis
Inflammation of the heart muscle can be fatal. If the inflammation interferes with cardiac function, it may affect the heart rhythm. Symptoms of heart muscle inflammation include shortness of breath and fast heart rate as well as chest pain.
The cardiogenic shock
This is one of the "killers" of heart disease. If in an acute cardiac insufficiency, for example due to myocarditis, the heart can no longer pump enough blood into the body, there is an acute lack of oxygen. The skin on the neck, arms, legs and chest looks marbled. Affected persons must be treated immediately with an emergency doctor, otherwise they will die.
Arrhythmia
If the heartbeat is irregular, we call it a cardiac arrhythmia. There is even a too slow heartbeat (bradycardia), in which a pacemaker is the right solution and too fast a heart rhythm (tachycardia). Too fast heartbeats occur mainly in the atrium or the ventricle and are dangerous. Atrial fibrillation is the leading cause of strokes.
In a tachycardia (above) the heart beats too fast, in the case of bradycardia (below) too slow. (Image: alex_aldo / fotolia.com) high blood pressure
Chronic hypertension can lead to heart failure. The heart muscle now has to spend more and more energy to pump blood. With this, the heart muscle grows, but a larger muscle needs more blood to be nourished, while at the same time receiving less blood. Possible consequences are coronary heart disease or stroke.
Causes of heart disease
Heart disease is one of the main causes of death in Western societies, while it is a minor problem in traditional cultures. Among other things, this is related to the possibilities and consequences of post-industrial cultures: obesity, diabetes mellitus and smoking. Obesity is associated with other risk factors for heart disease such as lack of exercise and high blood pressure.
Congenital heart defects
Congenital heart disease is counteracted by heart disease associated with lifestyle. These include valve defects or vascular disorders. Every 100th child born has a heart defect.
If there is a defect in the atrial septum, the septum between the left and right atria in the heart is open. It comes to a positive pressure, and so blood flows with plenty of oxygen in the right atrium. However, this is a reaction of the body to a not yet functioning lung and doctors therefore speak of a "short circuit defect", but not of a disease. Normally, such an open foramen ovale closes in the months following birth, but rarely does it persist and must be surgically occluded.
A defect of the ventricular septum, however, is a disease. Here the partition between the ventricles does not close, and blood from the left ventricle pushes into the right ventricle. Consequences include pulmonary hypertension with shortness of breath.
Further, children are born with narrowed aortic arches as well as with narrowed lung valves, also the aorta and pulmonary artery can be reversed.
At the first signs of a heart attack, the rescue service must be called immediately. (Image: pattilabelle / fotolia.com) Error in cardiac emergencies
The number one error in a heart failure is hesitation. As soon as you notice the first signs of a loved one, you should immediately call an ambulance: it counts every minute. If it comes to ventricular fibrillation, resuscitation must be started immediately.
Do not wait to see if the symptoms disappear automatically because you are afraid of false alarms. Call the emergency medical service with ambulance. The emergency doctor determines whether a false alarm is present - not you.
Call not the neighbor or the family doctor, but immediately the emergency services: 112.
Do not drive the affected person by car yourself. If VF begins, only an ambulance can help.
The heart in myth and history
Among the key findings of human cultures is the statement: A person whose heart beats lives. A person whose heart does not beat is dead. Consequently, the heart was the seat of life.
The heart constantly pumps blood through the body, thus ensuring the care of all organs. (Image: psdesign1 / fotolia.com) Egypt - The heart in the balance
The ancient Egyptians saw in the heart the core of the personality, an organ that held together not only the body but also the soul, that is what psychology calls the psyche. Because the Egyptians believed in a life after death, they embalmed their hearts and put them in the mummified corpses. The other organs did not have this meaning, and the priests buried them separate from the body in their own vessels.
When the dead man arrived in the other world, Anubis weighed his heart, the god of death with the body of a human and the head of a jackal. The feather of the Maat determined whether the deceased had lived righteously. If there was an imbalance, then a monster ate the heart.
The Egyptians tried to convince the hearts, who acted as independent personalities in the hereafter, to testify well about their bearer. So they wrote inscriptions on tombs like: "O heart that belongs to my nature! Do not stand up against me as a witness, do not resist me to the judges. "
The Egyptians, however, were not superstitious idiots, but their medicine was among the most advanced of ancient antiquity. They recognized that the heartbeat determined the pulse and called the pulse "the heart speaks". They measured the pulse and derived from its regularity the health of the patient. They already knew heart disease like vascular calcification or heart failure.
Unlike modern knowledge, however, they considered the heart and not the brain to be the seat of the soul that marked the nature of man, the place of feelings, thoughts, talents, and intelligence.
The heart in ancient China
The Taoist teaching in ancient China also mistook the heart as the seat of emotions as well as the mind. That's why the Doctrine of the Daodejing was important, which said how a person could develop a good and noble heart.
The heart sacrifice of the Aztecs
The Mexica in Mexico today held the heart of the human center. Their heart victims were infamous, in which they carved the hearts of prisoners of war on the pyramid of the capital Tenochtitlan (today Mexico City) with an obsidian knife from the thorax and offered as sacrifice to the sun god Huitzilopochtli.
Today's research considers the extent of these human sacrifices described by the Spanish conquistadors far too exaggerated, or more precisely, propaganda justifying the terrorist conquest.
In Christianity of the Middle Ages, the hearts of saints, such as the church teacher and mystic Teresa of Avila, as coveted relics. (Image: Alfonsodetomas / fotolia.com) The pulse of God
In the Christianity of the Middle Ages, the heart was considered as a connection between God and man and thus had a kind of own life. Many superstitions spread: as a remedy for epilepsy it was necessary to bite into the heart of a living wolf. Hearts of saints were valuable relics.
Sacred Heart Church designated Roman Catholic churches dedicated to the heart of the Messiah as the Blessed Sacrament of the Church. Body parts are first class relics in the Catholic Church, and among them, hearts are the most sought after, for example the heart of Teresa of Avila. The king was considered the "heart of the people", the pope the "heart of Christendom".
In Germany today the cutting of the corpse and the removal of body parts is prohibited and is considered a desecration of the dead, or at least as a disturbance of the dead.
In the Christian context, however, separate heart burials were widespread, not only among saints. Rulers were often buried at the place of their dying, but the heart was brought to their birthplace and kept in a special vessel. This custom lasted until modern times. As late as 1822, the dead politician Karl-August Fürst von Hardenberg was taken from his heart and remains today in the altar of a church in Neuhardenberg near Berlin.
The biological heart
In the Middle Ages teaching of the Middle Ages, the heart ennobled the blood produced in the liver while also maintaining body heat and "life force". The function of the hollow muscle as a blood pump, which was already known in antiquity in ancient China, was alien to the medieval thinking of Europe.
Only Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) used the term pump for the heart, and Miguel Seveto (1509-1553) discussed the pulmonary circulation; Shortly thereafter, William Harvey (1578-1657) proved that the blood does not "seep" into the body, but flows back to the heart. This was a shock to spiritual thinking because it made it clear that the body did not lead a separate existence and could therefore serve poorly as the seat of God in man.
The heart has long been known as a symbol of love - even if its form has little resemblance to the actual organ. (Image: Tierney / fotolia.com) The symbolic heart
To this day, however, the heart has retained in symbolism this spiritual meaning, namely, as an organ of love and great feelings for which, however, the real heart has no meaning - our feelings and thoughts arise in the brain, not just the systematic thinking of the "head people" but also empathy and intuition. Even those who "think with the heart" think real with the head.
Thousands of years, in which the heart was the seat of the soul, can not be banished from the culture. Legend has it that myth turns myth into a myth, the myth becomes a fairy tale and from there a metaphor in literature, and so too is our modern Western society overloaded with heart metaphors.
This is accompanied by "heart" complaints: when we are aroused, blood pressure rises, tachycardia, irregular heartbeat, shortness of breath and even cardiac arrest can be a consequence of extreme emotions. Those who feel anxious, who "beats the heart", who keeps a low pulse even in the face of objective danger, is considered "cold-blooded".
Psychic conflicts in the unconscious are perceived as pressure in the chest. If something is "dear to our heart," we actually feel it "in the heart"; "A stone falls from our hearts", we felt real before a load on the chest.
So we show significant physical reactions of the heart and the blood circulation to mental and emotional problems. No wonder our ancestors believed that these feelings would arise here. In reality, however, the signals that the heart receives come from the brain and are carried on nerves.
The first implantation of a pacemaker was performed in 1958 in Sweden. (Image: psdesign1 / fotolia.com) Modern heart medicine
The discovery of the blood circulation reversed the heart medicine. Only when science separated the supposed unity of soul and body did advanced treatment of heart disease be possible. In 1733, blood pressure was determined for the first time.
In the 20th century, heart medicine was rapidly advancing. 1923 was the first time successfully operated a valvular constriction, 1929 came the heart catheter used. In 1954, the heart and lungs were temporarily shut down with the heart-lung machine, allowing open heart surgery; just four years later, a human being had an artificial pacemaker for the first time. In 1967, for the first time, a human heart was transplanted. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)
Specialist supervision: Barbara Schindewolf-Lensch (doctor)
literature
Armin Dietz: Eternal Hearts. Small cultural history of heart burials. Munich 1998
Marianne Koch: The Heart Book. 2015
Petra Roßmüller-Meister: Heart attack. Signs, diagnosis and treatment. 2014.
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