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Hypertensive Heart Disease

The common layman knows hypertension as high blood pressure. High blood pressure is the name of a condition that raises the body's blood pressure, but how does this affect the heart?

The heart has passed through over a million years of evolution and is the most well designed pump on the planet. The hearts job is to pump blood around the body, without rest, at a constant rate. To pump blood at a constant rate the heart needs pressure to do so, the problem with this is some people have a heart that produces too much pressure to pump the blood.

If too much pressure is put on the arteries that carry the blood to the heart, the arteries can strain and rupture, or even worse the heart can fail under the strain of the pressure it has created itself.

Heart Failure

When the heart fails, it will lose the ability to pump blood round the body effectively, this means the oxygen and nutrients in the blood that is pumped round the body will not get to its destination causing death in the most extreme cases.

When the heart fails its not always both sides of the heart that does so, if it is the left side of the heart, with a ventricle and atrium chamber, fluid builds up in the lungs due to blood congesting in the veins.

If it is the right side of the heart, with a ventricle and atrium chamber, pressure in the veins increases causing fluid to build up in the legs tissues and organs in the lower parts of the body.

Symptoms of hypertensive heart disease

There are many symptoms that cross over into all types of heart disease but you can see the main symptoms associated with hypertensive heart disease below.

Fatigue - The lack of energy in the body, when suffering fatigue it is known for people to suffer with micro sleep, this is moments of sleep that last for a matter of seconds.

Dyspnea - This is the posh name given to a shortness of breath, you may feel tightness in the chest, and in some cases pain.

Weight gain - Exactly as the term says, this means putting weight on in a short period of time.

Irregular pulse - Most people will notice their own heart beating irregularly.

Summary

Most people understand the term heart attack or heart disease but they do not understand more technical terms like hypertensive heart disease, but this is important because the average person does not have a full understanding about the different types of heart disease.

If we can gain an understanding of the heart diseases plaguing the human race we might be able to reduce the chances we have of becoming another number in the yearly total of heart disease sufferers.

The heart is so important and never gets any rest, the problem is that we never think about our heart and what it means to us, may be its time to turn a new leave and we started to care about our bodies lifeline.