Cardiology
My old college professor used to tell us almost daily that correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it pretty stunning to see the concentration of heart disease related
deaths up the lower Mississippi River and Arkansas River Basins.
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Heart failure. Two of the scariest words in the English language. The American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Guidelines define it as “any structural or functional cardiac disorder that impairs the ability of the ventricle to fill with or eject blood” Simply put, any time the heart is unable to pump blood at a rate commensurate with the needs of body’s metabolizing cells, you have a case of heart failure.
Heart failure is often caused by a a defect in heart muscle contraction. In other cases, either the heart muscle itself functions properly, but the heart is faced with a load beyond its capacity; or ventricular filling is impaired.
Heart failure is only one of several possible underlying causes of the broader issue of circulatory failure in which an abnormality of some component of circulation is responsible for inaequate cardiac output. Circulatory failure can arise from heart failure, or from insufficient blood volume, low concentrations of oxygenated hemoglobin in arterial blood, or other circumstance that prevent an otherwise healthy heart from adequately meeting the metabolic needs of the body.
Researchers say breathing in polluted air does more than damage the lungs; it harms the heart, too.
Air pollution levels do not need to be very high to cause harm, researchers report in the Aug. 25 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Air pollution — even at levels deemed “acceptable” by the Environmental Protection Agency — leads to short- and long-term injury to the heart and blood vessels, increases rates of heart disease-related hospitalizations, and can even cause death.
“There doesn’t have to be an environmental catastrophe for air pollution to cause injury,” Boris Z. Simkhovich, MD, PhD, a senior research associate at the Heart Institute of the Good Samaritan Hospital and an assistant professor of research medicine at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, says in a news release. “We’re talking about very modest increases. Air pollution can be dangerous at levels that are within the accepted air quality standards.” [Read more...]
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