Coronary Artery Disease

Here are Causes, Symptoms, Tests and Precautions of Coronary Artery Disease.

A big Hi to all the viewers. I am Dr. Hardik Thakkar an MB physician practicing in Mumbai. I would like to take this opportunity to talk to you about coronary artery disease.

As the word suggests coronary artery disease is a lifestyle disorder which affects the blood vessels of the heart. What happens in you is there are these cholesterol throbey blocks as we call them in layman’s term which deposit in the arteries and then they cause blockage to your micro circulation in the heart. So because of this what happens is the patient complains of pain in the chest, breathlessness, leg swelling, and sometimes even palpitations and a lot of diabetic patients may just get asymptomatic MIs which is these blocks will be there but they may not have any symptoms as I mentioned before.

Now this disease is dreadful because a lot of times these episodes come suddenly in the middle of the night and you may not have enough time to respond and a lot of these patients if they have a very significant amount of block like more than 90 or may be a 100 percent block. They may even die within hours of reaching the hospital. This is the gravity of the situation and hence one has to act very very fast if it all you get a chest pain.

But to begin with since we are talking about lifestyle modification we want to know what is in the lifestyle which leads to the coronary artery disease. As we all know a lot of people from the urban areas who are having sedentary who are not eating right. They are not sleeping right and they are not even working out so all this puts a huge oxidant stress and the wrong diet along with high fi diet which leads to cholesterol deposition and the plagues in the coronary arteries. So what should be done? I mean we need to start at a young age because it is not as we have to wait till 40 and start acting because this plague starts developing as early as 15 years of age. To begin with to prevent the coronary artery disease you have to start early, eat healthy right from your young age. Workout regularly and have an active lifestyle and avoid smoking and alcohol. Smoking is one of the major confounding factors which predisposes to lot of damage to endothelium of your arteries.

So leading a good lifestyle right from the beginning is very very important to you know take care of your coronary artery disease and diabetics as a matter of fact are at a very high risk of having coronary artery disease as compared to the general population. And I would also recommend the public I mean the regular people at least above 40 years to have a stresses done at least once a year along with your lipid profile sugar. This is just to make sure you are on a right track and you are not missing a coronary artery disease. I would like to talk a little bit in brief on this stress test which is you know a test which used to diagnose Angina.

So what we do we make a patient run on treadmill for ten minutes and we record ECGs of all the ten minutes along with the BP changes and if it all if a person has a hidden heart disease not reflected on his symptoms we pick it up and this is followed by the angiography. Once the angiography is done depending on the amount if blocks that are found we treat the patient either medically or with stents or by bypass. This is dictated by the number of arteries the location of plague and the extent of the block. So that’s about it for coronary artery disease at the moment.

If you wish to have more private consultation with me you can reach me through my website which is www.drhardikthakkar.com or also through the lybrate website which is www.lybrate.com. Thank you very much for your time.