Heart Disease Prevention - How To Prevent Sudden Cardiac Death?

It is not uncommon to hear about the sudden passing of people who are practically healthy. Among those victims, some were young athletes. How did all these happen? According to cardiologists, this is almost always due to sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), a condition in which the heart stops pumping effectively… More details can be found at: 

Heart Disease Prevention - How To Prevent Sudden Cardiac Death?

Heart Disease Prevention - What Is Cardiomyopathy?

Cardiomyopathy is a heart disease of abnormal heart muscle. Heart muscle of a patient with cardiomyopathy becomes enlarged, thick or rigid. Some patients might have their muscle tissue in the heart being replaced with scar tissue, though this is very rare. Read more at:

Heart Disease Prevention - What Is Cardiomyopathy?

Depression Will Lead to Heart Disease For Women!

Diabetes, high blood pressure (hypertension), high cholesterol and smoking have long been regarded as culprits that cause heart disease. Depression, which is common for patients after heart attack or stroke, and would probably worsen these patients’ outcomes, could simply break a healthy woman's heart silently.

A study by researchers from Columbia University reported that new evidence has been gathered to show depression can certainly lead to heart disease for women. The findings of the 12-year study were published on March 9, 2009 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

In the study, 63,000 women from the long-running Nurses' Health Study were tracked between 1992 and 2004. When the study began, there was no sign of heart disease among all participants except nearly 8 percent of them had evidence of serious depression.

Those women with depression were more than twice as likely to experience sudden cardiac death, which is caused by an irregular heartbeat. Furthermore, they had a smaller increased risk of death from other form of heart disease.

The researchers were also surprised to note that sudden cardiac death seemed more closely related to the antidepressant use than with the depression symptoms the women had. This might imply that women who were prescribed with antidepressants were the most seriously depressed, though such finding would still require more research to confirm.

In fact, the newer antidepressants frequently used now had not been reported to cause a risk of irregular heartbeat. To the contrary, some research has even suggested having some sort of protection. Nevertheless, the researchers argue that the current finding does add to the growing evidence that depression could be an independent risk factor for heart disease.

To achieve heart disease prevention for depressed women, it is suggested that further study should be carried out to test whether appropriate treatment would lower the risk of getting heart disease for those depressed women.

Sleep Adequately to Prevent Heart Disease!

If a person reduces his or her sleep duration, then his or her risk of getting heart disease would be higher.

A recent study indicated that sleeping less than 7.5 hours a night would increase the chance of cardiovascular risk, including heart attack and stroke, by 33 percent. The paper was published by researchers from Jichi Medical University on November 12, 2008 in the Journal of the American Medical Association's Archives of Internal Medicine.

The sleep of 1,255 people with hypertension (also known as high blood pressure) was monitored by the Japanese researchers for an average period of 50 months. Their daytime and nighttime blood pressure, sleep duration, and cardiovascular disease events like heart attack, stroke and sudden cardiac death were tracked.

In the study, there were 99 incidents of cardiovascular disease being recorded. It was also found that the rate for people who slept less than 7.5 hours was 2.4 per 100 person-years. Those who slept more had a lower incident rate of 1.8 per 100 person-years. Meanwhile, the researchers also discovered that people whose blood pressure rose at night were more prone to heart disease.

The researchers believed that shorter duration of sleep is actually a predictor of incident cardiovascular disease in elderly individuals with hypertension.

In the meantime, inadequate sleep has also been linked to higher chances of diabetes, obesity and several risk factors for cardiovascular disease, which includes nighttime hypertension and sleep-disordered breathing.

Is Comprehensive Screening Good Enough to Detect Sudden Cardiac Death?

Is comprehensive heart screening sufficient for young people who are engaging in aggressive exercises such as Marathon running, military training, etc? Should they also undergo additional testing with treadmill exercise and echocardiography (cardiac ultrasound)?

What is sudden cardiac death? As defined by American Heart Association, sudden cardiac death (SCD) or cardiac arrest is the sudden, abrupt loss of heart function in a person who may or may not have diagnosed heart disease. It just occurs immediately or shortly after the symptoms appear.

Every year, sudden cardiac death causes about 166,200 deaths among adults in the United States before reaching a hospital or emergency room.

For people below the age of 35, SCD has many causes. Not all of these causes are due to cardiac problems and only some of these can be detected by screening. Patients who die suddenly are commonly caused by cardiovascular disease, in particular, coronary heart disease (CAD), but it rarely happens to younger age group.

No doubt treadmill ECG stress testing can be used to detect CAD. Nevertheless, it does have its own limitations. For example, it has a false positive result of 10 to 20 percent. In other words, if CAD occurs in 1 per 1,000 people screened, out of 25,000 persons tested, 25 might have CAD. This means that 2,500 to 5,000 might have false positive stress results, and these people have to undergo further testing, such as nuclear imaging and coronary angiography, which may have other risks such as radiation exposure.

It is unjustified to place such a big percentage of people to these risks, as this would certainly outweigh the benefit of detecting a few with CAD. Obviously, stress testing should only be used for those at higher risk such as older men or those with significant risk factors for heart disease.

For youngsters, a more common cause of SCD is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). It is an inherited condition with abnormal thickening of the heart muscle. People with HCM will show ECG abnormalities.

In fact, adding ECG to a history and physical examination in athletes, and referring only those with ECG abnormalities for more tests was proved to be an effective mean to minimize the risk of SCD due to HCM. Such approach has also been shown by studies in Italy and endorsed by the International Olympic Committee and European Society of Cardiology.

Meanwhile, prevention and control of risk factors like diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension (high blood pressure), obesity, and smoking through healthy lifestyles should be encouraged to reduce SCD.