CVD Treament Approaches

With the number of treatment options rapidly increasing. CVD patient and their doctors must often make critical choices, surgery versus drug therapy, a tried and true medication versus one that may be even more effective but has undesirable side effects, and so forth. It is therefore crucial that everyone know something about the surgical breakthroughs and drug therapies in the field of cardiovascular disease.

When former secretary of state Hendry Kissinger underwent coronary bypass surgery in 1982, he became one of the thousands of people to benefit from what is now the most common heart operation in the United States. Considered by many to be the treatment of choice when one or more coronary arteries are blocked or significantly narrowed, the procedure is successful in easing angina pain and, many believe, in reducing the changes of heart attack. A vein, usually from the patient's leg, is grafted to the aorta and to a healthy portion of the coronary artery, thereby defouring bood around the diseased area. A less expensive alternative to bypass surgery is corronary angioplasty. A balloon is threaded into the narrowed artery and then inflated, cracking obstructing plaque and opening the passage.

The choices available to heart patients have widened considerably with the advent of drug theraphy, in fact many specialists feet that surgery, especially the coronary bypass procedure is often unnecessary and that drug therapy is safer, just as effective, and certainly cheaper in combating some cardiovascular problems. One of the most beneficial of the new drugs is propanolol, a now widely prescribed beta-blocker. So called because they block nerve impulses to certain areas (beta receptors) in body tissues, beta blockers reduce the heart's work load by decreasing the rate at which the heart beats and the force of its contractions. Propanolol and some dozen other beta blockers have been very successful in the treatment of high blood pressure, angina and arrhythmias.

More recently, a new family of drugs tested in Europe, calcium channel blockers, has been released by the Food and Drug Administration for use in the United States. These new drugs can cause dilation of the arteries. This can result in a lowering of perpheral blood pressure so that there is less resistance against which the diseased heart must pump, the calcium blockers can also cause the coronary arteries to enlarge in diameter, thereby increasing blood flow to the heart muscle; and the drugs slow the force of contraction of the heart muscle itself, and in this way reduce this amount of energy, or oxygen carrying blood, the heart needs to expend during each beat.

A still experimental approach has proven effective in actually stopping coronary thromboses, caused by blood clots, while they are under way. When injected into the corronary arteries, the drug streptokinase can dissolve the offending to the heart muscle. Streptokinase is of no use once the damage is done, another reason it's vital to recognize the symptoms of heart attack and call for help without delay.