10 Seconds Left
How can you keep yourself alive when you are alone and suddenly have a heart attack? The following appear in the Health Gazette published by Alexander Grant, MD of Indianapolis:
"Without help, the person whose heart stops beating properly and who begins to feel faint has only about 10 seconds left before he loses consciousness. However, heart attack victims can help themselves by repeated coughing" Take a very deep breath before each cough, with the cough as strong and prolonged as when bringing up sputum from deep inside the chest, he advises.
A breath and a cough must be repeated every 1 to 2 seconds without a break until help arrives or you feel the heart beating normally again. Deep breaths get oxygen into the lungs and coughing squeezes the heart and keeps the blood circulating. "In this way, heart attach victims can get to the phone, and, between breaths, call for help", Grant says.
Carbon Monoxide Trouble
If you have ever experienced angina, a usually painful episode in which the heart muscle does not get enough oxygen, avoid exertion on smog-alert days. The colourless, odourless gas in the air on smoggy days known as carbon monoxide can cause unconsciousness and death. The 2.5 million Americans with angina are at risk in an environment polluted with vehicle exhausts, fires, cigarettes and other sources. The deadly gas prevents the haemoglobin in the red blood cells from carrying oxygen to the tissues.
Deliberately inhaling carbon monoxide from a car exhaust is a common form of suicide. Since episodes of angina may sometimes be painless, you cannot always depend on chest pain to tell you your heart is in trouble from carbon monoxide.
Smoking
It is no coincidence that smoking, besides greatly increasing the risk of lung cancer, is also bad for the heart. Smokers have always had more heart trouble than non smokers. Recent studies have shown smoking's sinister, silent effects on the cardiovascular system.
A report from the Journal of the American Medical Association documents evidence that the blood flow in the coronary arteries is drastically reduced in smokers. A test group of smokers was hooked up to a portable electrocardiogram known as a Holter Monitor for 24 hours of normal daily activity, including smoking. Tracing changes indicated a blood flow decrease in the arteries supplying the heart lasting 12 times longer than normal during the test period. The reduction could bring on a heart attack.
Artery Widening
Scientists have recently shown you can actually widen coronary arteries that have been narrowed by plaque build-up. Dietary and lifestyle changes can lower blood cholesterol and cut the risk of heart disease.
Research conducted at the University of California, San Francisco showed that a year of a very low fat diet along with moderate exercise, a stress management programme and abstaining from smoking slowed down the narrowing of coronary arteries an average of 10% while lowering cholesterol levels by 30% and levels of "bad" LDL by 40% in severely affected heart patients. Even though a super-healthy lifestyle may help reverse atherosclerosis
preventing it in the first place with healthy living is still the better
approach.
MET Energy Measurement
Counting calories is not the only way to measure energy expenditure during exercise. MET (short for metabolic equivalent) is a unit of measurement used to describe the energy cost of an exercise in terms of oxygen consumption. Doctors use the MET measurement to show how hard the heart has to work at a certain level of exercise intensity.
One MET is the energy expenditure sitting quietly at rest and equals an oxygen consumption of 3.5 millilitres per kilogram of bodyweight per minute. An exercise with a workload of 5 METs used five times the amount of oxygen used in the resting state.
Since the heart muscle must have a sufficient supply of oxygen to perform well, an activity that has a high MET level might be too intense for a person with an existing heart problem. The MET is used to determine the amount of exercise a person is capable of doing without overtaking the heart. Thus a doctor who is experienced in sports medicine can write an exercise prescription that provides an adequate cardiovascular effect without the risk of overloading the heart.
Before you start any exercise program I would advise you to consult your doctor first.
Back to Articles