What are Coronary Heart Disease and How Do They Affect Our Society?

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Coronary Heart Diseases

Introduction

Coronary heart disease and strokes are the most well known forms of cardiovascular disease. In spite of the noteworthy technological advancements, coronary heart diseases contribute the major share in the death of people around the globe and remain the leading cause of premature deaths in world.

Discussion

Our heart works evenly throughout our lives and supplies blood to all parts of the body. Coronary arteries are the blood vessels that supply blood to the heart through network of blood vessels. It supplies the heart with oxygen and nutrition essential for normal functioning of the heart cells. The blood provides essential nutrients and oxygen that the heart muscles, myocardium need to pump the blood to entire body. The coronary heart disease develops when the coronary artery becomes diseased or damaged.

Coronary Artery Disease

Human heart has four chambers right atrium, left atrium, right ventricle and left ventricle. The right atrium brings the blood coming back from the entire body to the heart. The blood then flows into right ventricle that pumps it to the lungs for oxygenation. The blood rich in oxygen returns to the left atrium from after passing through lungs. From the left atrium the blood flows into left ventricle and is pumped at high pressure to the entire body. The contraction of the left ventricle should be extremely powerful to ensure that blood leaves the heart at high pressure that is enough to keep it flowing throughout the body. The strength of the heart muscles depends on the kind of supply of oxygen and nutrients that are coming through coronary arteries. In a normal individual these arteries are strong, flexible and elastic. If the coronary artery on any other heart segment becomes damaged, heart disease can occur. This is usually caused by Atherosclerosis which is a special form of arteriosclerosis.

The process escorting to atherosclerosis begins with the deposition of yellow colored deposit of material that contains high proportion of cholesterol and fatty materials. This is deposited within the inner coat of arteries (endothelium). Afterwards fibers are also deposited in the layer of cholesterol and these starts to harden. These deposits are known as Atheromatous Plaques. As time passes by the deposition increases and plaque enlarges thereby entering in to the lumen of the artery and acting as a barrier to the blood flow by blocking it. If this occurs in the coronary artery the supply of oxygen and essential nutrients to the heart is greatly reduced. There are high chances of a blood clot being developed in the artery if the plaque breaks through the smooth endothelium. The clot is known as thrombus that might enlarge enough to block the entire artery. If this thrombus breaks away from its initial area of formation it might travel along and block another location. This clot is then known as embolus (Wick and Grundtman, 2011)

The arterial walls becomes weak in the process and overstretch, the stretching might ...