Healthcare And Coranare Heart Disease Essay Research

Healthcare And Coranare Heart Disease Essay, Research Paper

Coronary Heart disease is a disease where the coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart become blocked. The blockage is in the form of a blood clot that can block a percentage of all five arteries. Cholesterol deposits cause this blockage. This fact has allowed doctors to determine that diet has a significant role in who develops this disease.

People’s diets are affected by their economic class and by other social factors. The poor of our country generally eat meals that contain high fat and cholesterol. Their diet puts them at higher risk. However, the risk is not significantly higher because of the high amount of overweight people in America, which span all economic groups.

Exercise is another important factor. The more exercise people get the lower the risk of heart disease. Part of the reason for this is the fact that people that exercise tend to have more healthy lifestyles, which include lower levels of alcohol use and lower fat diets.

My stepfather had coronary heart disease. He talked about it freely before he passed away. Over the course of 10 years he had two triple bypass surgeries. He believed he contracted the disease due to poor diet, smoking and a family history of the disease. Throughout the entire time his outlook remained very positive. There were several dramatic changes that the disease caused. He quit smoking after the first heart attack. On the first year after surgery many things went on like they had before the surgery. Family activities didn t change much. The only noticeable difference was the fact that he quit smoking.

Each year, 900,000 people in the United States have a heart attack. Of these, roughly 225,000 die, including 125,000 who die before ever getting any medical attention. But advances in treatment have meant that even more victims can survive and go on to live normal, healthy lives (www.intellihealth.com) Even with these new treatments the disease is a killer. Doctors have found ways to extend the life of people with the disease, but they have not found a way to completely cure the disease. Once people contract Coronary Heart disease they eventually die from having it.

When looked at across the population, Heart disease is possibly the most expensive disease. The AHA estimates the cost of cardiovascular diseases and stroke in 1999 at $286.5 billion. This figure includes direct costs, which include the cost of physicians and other professionals, hospital and nursing home services, the cost of medications, home health and other medical durables and lost productivity resulting from morbidity and mortality (indirect costs). (www.americanheart.org) This huge cost is large financial burden. A percentage of these costs could be avoided if Americans would chose to live more healthy lifestyles. According to 1996 estimates 58,800,000 Americans has one or more forms of cardiovascular disease (CVD). (www.americanheart.org). This high number of people with heart disease is going to lead to even higher cost in the future. Furthermore, the aging of the population is going to put a huge strain on the already overtaxed Medicare and Medicaid system.

This disease is a killer and there are a great number of things that can be pointed to that cause it. Overall, we can improve our odds of survival by not smoking and living healthy lifestyles. However, all of us will not be able to avoid the disease. The fact that so many people have the disease and the fact that so much money is spent on the disease has caused drug companies and private groups to make great advancements in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease.

Coronary heart disease has several levels of severity. These

varying levels of severity have caused the evolution of several treatments for heart disease. There are three main types of treatment that go along with changing diet habits and increased exercise. The three main treatments are open-heart surgery, balloon angioplasty, and stinting, which can be subsequent to the angioplasty.

Balloon angioplasty is the process of lapthroscopacly going into the veins and inflating a small balloon to push open the blockages. The use of stentscan come after this procedure. ” Stents are scaffolding devices that maintain vessel patency after an interventional procedure, usually balloon

angioplasty. Coronary stenting is now used in more than 50% of patients

undergoing nonsurgical myocardial revascularization. [1] It is considered a

routine adjunct to coronary angioplasty”(Saunders).

Doctors have several techniques that they use to determine which procedure to use for treatment. One of the most common is the arteriogram. This procedure allows the doctors to determine the level of blockage in the coronary arteries. Nurses also perform some diagnostic procedures. An echocardiogram is a process that images the heart structure and the bloodflow through the valves. This procedure is an inevasive procedure that doesn t require any special conditions. It is not possible to see the blockage with this procedure; however, it is possible to see the effect of blockage.

Managed care and other economic factors have caused patients to have long delays in waiting for diagnostic tests to be run. One reason for this is that, Over the past two decades there has been an exponential incre