February is American Heart Month

February is Heart Month. Dr. Daniel Jones, immediate past President of the American Heart Association and Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs at the University of Mississippi talked to MPB’s Karen Brown about general heart health for men and women.

Karen: Are heart attacks and strokes related to one another?

Dr. Jones: They are indeed. There is a similar mechanism for heart attacks and strokes. Sometimes you’ll hear strokes referred to as brain attacks to try and draw that correlation. Both heart attacks and strokes generally result from blockage of an artery that supplies blood to the heart muscle or supplies blood to the brain. When we develop Atherosclerosis or that plaque that builds up in the arteries and then have some type of thrombosis or clot that occurs in that plaque, if it occurs in the heart vessel, it’s a heart attack and if it occurs in a brain vessel it’s a stroke.

Karen: How is one’s blood pressure related to heart health?

Dr. Jones: Blood pressure is the most common risk factor in Americans that leads to heart disease. Hypertension along with cholesterol problems, diabetes and other risk factors contribute to the development of Atherosclerosis or the build-up of plaque in the arteries. And when that plaque builds up in the arteries in the heart we call it coronary heart disease and that’s what leads to a heart attack.

Karen: Is that heart disease is defined, by the plaque that builds up?

Dr.Jones: It’s the most common way people develop heart disease in this country. There are other ways that people can develop heart disease. For instance, there are viruses that can attack the heart muscle and then there are other illnesses that can affect the heart but when people in the United States talk about having heart disease, the vast majority of them have coronary heart disease or Atherosclerosis, build-up of plaque in those arteries in the heart. It’s the most common form of heart disease by far.

Karen: What about cholesterol and triglycerides in relation to the heart?

Dr. Jones: Both cholesterol and triglycerides are part of the formula for what develops heart disease. People who have this combination of high blood pressure, smoking and cholesterol and triglyceride problems are likely to develop heart disease. The level of cholesterol and triglyceride impact which blood vessels in our body are going to be most affected with Atherosclerosis.

Karen: Why smoking?

Dr. Jones: Smoking damages blood vessels in a number of ways. There are bad things in that smoke: nicotine and other things that acutely have an effect on blood vessels by constricting the blood vessels and impeding the flow of blood. Then, in a number of mechanisms, the toxins that are in tobacco smoke are in smokeless tobacco. When people absorb it through their mouth there are things that can lead to and encourage the build-up of plaque in our blood vessels.

Karen: We’re not surprised when we hear of someone who’s older and overweight who smokes having a heart attack. But when it’s someone in their twenties or thirties who appears in the peak of health, what does that mean? What’s happened?

Dr. Jones: Occasionally, those people who are very young have the same mechanism for heart disease as older people do. They simply have a more difficult set of risk factors. Their genetics are worse. They have severe problems with cholesterol. They’re smokers. They have diabetes. You can have the same kind of mechanisms that lead to heart disease in older people and young people but sometimes in younger people there are the less common causes of heart disease. You may see things like inflammation that’s involving blood vessels that may lead to a heart attack or one of those viruses that attacks the heart muscle directly. The younger the patient, the more vigorously we need to look for uncommon causes of heart disease.

Karen: If someone is diagnosed with heart disease, will living a healthier lifestyle prevent that disease from increasing in severity or will it get rid of it altogether?

Dr. Jones: It will absolutely give them a benefit and the opportunity to lead a longer life and a higher quality life if a healthy lifestyle is adopted. Even after the development of heart disease there are some studies that demonstrate that very aggressive diets that lead to lower cholesterol levels and so forth can actually reverse some of the damage from Atherosclerosis in the blood vessels. Typically though we have medications that help those patients as well and generally once you develop heart disease you want to use a combination of lifestyle therapy and medications in order to give yourself the best chance of living a long and healthy life.