Cardiology is the heartbeat of modern medicine, a specialized field dedicated to understanding, diagnosing, and treating disorders of the heart and circulatory system. It’s helpful for the general public to understand how the heart works, the various conditions that can affect it, and how individuals can promote heart health in order to live long, healthy lives.
Tina DeGroot, PhD, APRN, and Jonathan Milton, MSN, APRN, offer essential information about the heart and how to protect it from harm.
How Does the Heart Work?
The heart functions as a pump, working continuously to circulate blood throughout the body. This blood delivers oxygen and nutrients to organs and muscles, ensuring they function properly. The heart has four chambers: the upper atria and the lower ventricles. Blood flows through these chambers in a coordinated manner before being pumped out to the rest of the body, maintaining the vital process of circulation.
“Think of the heart as a pump and the arteries are like highways for the blood. They carry blood from the heart to all parts of the body, muscles, organs, and even your skin. Your blood in the arteries has oxygen and nutrients that the body needs to stay healthy and strong,” explains Milton. “Without the arteries, our blood wouldn’t be able to get to all the places that it needs to, to feed those vital organs to work properly, and for us to function and perform our everyday tasks.”
Identifying Potential Heart Issues
When patients visit a cardiologist, primary care doctors often have already conducted basic tests like lab work to check blood counts and electrolytes. In cardiology, the diagnostic process typically begins with an EKG (electrocardiogram), which measures the heart’s electrical activity to identify potential irregularities. If the EKG shows abnormalities, the next step is often an echocardiogram, a painless ultrasound that visualizes heart valves, blood flow, and the thickness of the left ventricle, providing critical insights into heart function.
Another key diagnostic tool is the stress test, which evaluates how the heart responds to exertion. This can be done in three ways:
- walking or running on a treadmill while monitoring electrical activity
- combining treadmill activity with a tracer injection to capture detailed blood flow images
- using medication to simulate exercise for patients unable to use a treadmill
Together, EKGs, echocardiograms, and stress tests provide essential information for diagnosing cardiac conditions, all without causing discomfort to the patient.
Optimizing Lifestyle Management to Prevent Heart Disease
Cardiovascular disease can be hereditary, to a certain extent. But, looking at the research, Dr. DeGroot really wants to promote lifestyle management in mitigating heart disease risk.
“If both of your parents had cardiovascular disease, absolutely talk to your primary care provider about that But, we also want to really start cueing people into lifestyle management. Weight loss, watching your sodium, exercise. All of those things are really important when we’re talking about cardiovascular disease,” she states.
The above elements all contribute to keeping blood pressure at an acceptable level. High blood pressure forces the heart, particularly the left ventricle, to work harder, which can lead to its enlargement or thickening over time. These changes increase the risk of heart failure and heart attacks.
Dr. DeGroot notes that updated guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association in 2019 lowered the target blood pressure from 140/80 to 130/80. This change allows for earlier intervention through lifestyle modifications like improved diet, exercise, and reduced salt intake.
Early detection of hypertension has been shown to help prevent complications like strokes, kidney disease, and heart disease. Importantly, most cases, especially in younger adults, can be managed without medication, emphasizing the effectiveness of lifestyle changes.
“When I think about lifestyle management, I think of it as an umbrella term. Each of the spokes of the umbrella is a different area people might choose to combat or choose to modify,” says Milton. “For instance, one of those spokes might be eating healthy. Or, individuals can consider moving, physical activity, as a big spoke underneath that lifestyle modification umbrella.”
Another crucial step is to quit smoking. “We work really closely with our patients because we know that nicotine addiction is incredibly difficult to interrupt,” shares Dr. DeGroot. “So, we talk to them about smoking cessation and help them either with behavioral modification or sometimes pharmacological support to help them reduce the amount of nicotine they ingest. Of course, the ultimate goal is to stop smoking altogether.”
To learn more about Stoughton Health Cardiology Services, click here or call (608) 873-2349.
