Cholesterol and Heart Disease

Your heart is a pretty spectacular organ - a four-chambered, hollow muscle right smack in the middle of your chest. The heart's job is to pump the blood that carries life-giving oxygen and other nutrients to every body tissue. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day, blood flows out from your heart to carry oxygen and other nutrients to every tissue and organ in your body, and then comes back to your heart to pick up more oxygen and nutrients. In other words, blood circulates, which is why your heart and the vessels through which blood travels are called the circulatory system.

The best way to explain this process is to begin at the beginning, the point at which blood flows back from your body, into your heart.

The blood enters your heart from the superior vena cava, a large vein that opens into the right atrium, the first chamber of your heart. From the right atrium, blood spills down through a one-way "trapdoor" called the tricuspid valve and into the right ventricle. When the right ventricle contracts (squeezes together), the blood is sent out of your heart through the pulmonary artery and into your lungs where it picks up a plentiful supply of oxygen. The newly oxygenated blood flows back into your heart through the pulmonary vein into the left atrium. Then the blood spills down through a second one-way trapdoor called the mitral valve and into the left ventricle.When the left ventricle contracts, blood is pushed up through the large artery called the aorta and out into your body.

In real life the right atrium and the left atrium receive blood simultaneously from the vena cava and the pulmonary vein respectively. The right and the left atria (plural for atrium) contract simultaneously to send blood down through the tricuspid valve and the mitral valve respectively. And the right and left ventricles contract simultaneously to push blood up into the pulmonary artery and the aorta respectively. All this without missing a beat.

Heart disease includes conditions affecting the heart, such as coronary heart disease, heart attack, congestive heart failure, and congenital heart disease. Heart disease is the leading killer of Americans, and heart attacks are the most common form of heart disease. Is is estimated that it is killing one person every 34 seconds in the United States alone. But you don't have to take my word for it.

Many U.S. government agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics, have piled up a ton of stats and translated all the numbers into dozens of charts to show exactly how lethal heart disease can be. Feel free to browse the web. You will be amazed what you will find about heart disease.

The United States isn't alone in its battle with cardiovascular disease (CVD) and coronary heart disease (CHD) - heart attack. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), CVD and CHD are the Number One problems around the globe. Grouping the rich countries, poor countries, and countries in-between, WHO statisticians discovered one common thread: Heart disease kills more people every year than any other illness or medical condition.

You've probably made a commitment to, well, try to control your cholesterol before it controls you. Heart disease and heart attack send a great many folks to their ultimate reward. Now you've reached the heart of the matter: cholesterol.

In the past half century, literally hundreds of well-run scientific studies, run by thousands of different researchers in dozens of different countries, have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that having high cholesterol - specifically, high levels of LDLs is a strong warning that Mr. Heart Disease and Ms. Heart Attack are lying in wait somewhere in the future. Luckily, a similar long list of studies shows that what you eat and how you live your life to stay fit and relatively trim can help reduce your risk.

As for cholesterol, believe it or not, too low can be as problematic as too high. For example, if your cholesterol suddenly takes a nosedive into the basement below 100 mg/dL, your doctor may not be smiling when he brings you the news. Hypocholesterolemia - very low cholesterol - can signal danger ahead. What kind of danger? Malnutrition, an overactive thyroid, cirrhosis of the liver, and certain forms of cancer (colon cancer and liver cancer are good guesses).

Having consistently low cholesterol is not always a guarantee of long life. In the late 1990s, in a survey of 3,500 Japanese American male residents of Hawaii, researchers found a higher death rate among the men with the lowest cholesterol levels (about 149 mg/dL) than among men whose cholesterol levels circled around the supposedly borderline 232 mg/dL mark.

What you eat and drink plays an important role in controlling your cholesterol. So does maintaining a healthful weight, engaging in a realistic exercise program, and avoiding every form of tobacco and smoking. And if these basic first steps don't do the job, cholesterol-lowering medications, offer yet another option. Each of these methods for lowering your cholesterol - cholesterol lowering food, weight control, exercise, and cholesterol medicines - can help you to reduce your cholesterol risks. As a health-conscious consumer, you get to pick and choose among them - like a gourmet at a gorgeous buffet table. A low-fat, low-cholesterol food table, of course. Go for it. Your heart will thank you.