Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD)

It is one of the ironies of our society that people who rarely forget to fasten their seat belts, who scrupulously eliminate all known carcinogens from their diet, and who install sophisticated burglar alarm systems, may nevertheless take few precautions against cardiovascular disease (CVD), a class of highly preventable disorder that pose a severe threat to life, health, and well being.

According to the 1983 edition of Heart Facts, a booklet published by the American Heart Association, disease of the heart (cardio) and blood vessels (vascular) claim more American lives than all other causes of death combined. Cancer, which is for more widely feared, takes 400,000 lives in this country each year; but more than 1 million men, women, and children succumb to CVD annually. A stealthy killer that develops slowly and without noticeable symptom over a number of years, CVD takes many forms, including high blood pressure, coronary artery disease (disease of the arteries supplying the heart muscle), stroke, abnormal heart rhythms, and rheumatic heart disease. About 25,000 babies are born every year with hearth defects, and a stiffening total of 42.3 million Americans have some form of CVD. In all, heart and blood vessel disorders cost the nation $ 60 billion annually in medical expenses, lost wages, curtailed production, and lost labor.

Although CVD usually manifest itself during middle age, the seeds of the disorder seem to be sown decades earlier. In a now-famous study, army pathologist examined the hearts of 300 American soldiers who were killed in combat in Korea. These young men (their average age was twenty two) were apparently in good health when they were killed, and none were known to be suffering from heart disease at the time of death. Yet in more than 75 percent of the men, the coronary atherosclerotic process (a process in which coronary arteries are narrowed) bad already begun. As the study Cardiovascular Diseases can begin “silently,” while people are still in their late teens and twenty.