heart attack pictures and illustrations

heart attack pictures and illustrations, the images of damage

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Heart attack pictures and illustrations can paint a thousand words. Let’s take a look at what actually happens within your coronary arteries.

heart muscle and artery It’s true. Certain personal characteristics and lifestyles point to an increased danger of coronary heart disease, heart attack and stroke. These danger signs are called "risk factors". The well established risk factors are high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, cigarette smoking and diabetes mellitus. Other factors that may increase or affect the risk for heart attack are obesity, a sedentary life-style, an aggressive response to stress, and certain drugs.

Heart attack pictures and illustrations to help you understand

cholesterol in coronary artery The heart is a muscle, and as such it needs blood and oxygen to do it’s work properly. This is the same for every muscle in our body, our biceps, pectorals, thighs … they all need a constant blood supply to survive. When blood flow is interrupted to your heart problems will occur.

But more than just a muscle, the heart is a pump. As is true with any pump, a certain amount of maintenance will guarantee better use and a longer life. With mechanical water pumps, lime deposits and garden debris may build up along the pipes leading to the pump, or the pressure within the pipes may cause the pump to overwork, which over time may lead to failure. The heart attack pictures here illustrate how this happens.

Let me tell you a short story. We have quite a large garden and we’re fortunate enough to have a water well which allows us to water the grass and plants throughout the summer. Many of you know how sad a yellow lawn looks in the hot summer months. Well, with regular water, your lawn can be a nice fresh green all year round. Sorry, I’m loosing track!

If you would like to find more detailed information on this subject and other heart saving topics visit our e-Store.

Well we have a small electrical water pump deep down in the well. It’s been there for years and nobody’s ever bothered looking at it, let alone open it up to clean it. No, too much work. After about 10 years of service (which I’ve been told is very good), the pump started playing up. The supply of water that it would pump wasn’t smooth, but would come and go at irregular bursts and in the end it just stopped working. At that point we decided to open it up to see if we could do anything. What a sight! It was full of algae, fine sand and grit, rust and strange little water bugs. We decided to buy a new pump!

Why am I telling you this story? If that pump was your heart, you’d now be dead of a heart attack! There are a lot of familiarities with my story and what can happen to somebody’s heart. Don’t wait until it’s too late. With your heart, you can’t just go down to your local hardware store and buy another one!

From looking at these heart attack pictures and illustrations, you can see that an accumulation of a fatty, wax like substance within the coronary arteries, called a plaque, can cause a partial, or total blockage. The plaque can break or rupture and the contents when in contact with the blood flowing through the artery can cause a thrombus, and this can be particularly dangerous.

Click here to return to our What is a Heart Attack page.