Heart Disease

Each year heart disease kills more people than the next four leading causes of death combined, including all forms of cancer and all types of accidents. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 40 percent of all deaths recorded each year are caused by heart disease and related blood-vessel disorders such as stroke and high blood pressure.

• Heart disease and related disorders kill more than 960,000 Americans a year.
• Over 61 million Americans have some form of heart or blood vessel disease.
• Total U.S. medical costs for all heart and blood vessel diseases exceed $185 billion annually.

But the byword among cardiologists and researchers today is hope, tempered by the knowledge that we can and must do much more. The rate of heart disease in the U.S. is still among the highest in the world, due in part to lack of proper diet and exercise, and other unhealthy personal habits like cigarette smoking. So, the battle to defeat heart disease must be fought on two fronts: the research lab and our homes.

Our attention to changing the way we live -- reducing personal stress and seeking early detection and treatment -- has helped. From 1987 to 1997 the death rate from heart attacks actually declined nearly 25 percent. Much of this progress is also due to a fast-paced revolution in the medicines used to treat and prevent heart attacks, strokes, high blood pressure, and related circulatory diseases that combine to produce high risks of death and disability in many individuals.

Exciting new therapies promise to stop heart attacks even before the patient reaches the hospital, reducing the need for expensive and hazardous coronary artery bypass surgery. Other new treatments promise to dissolve dangerous blood clots and reverse the crippling effects of strokes.

What actually happens when someone suffers a heart attack? What causes high blood pressure or angina (suffocating chest pains)? And why are these particular medicines effective against these and similar conditions?

This chapter and chapter two on high blood pressure will help you understand more about your heart medicines and why they can help you if you have heart disease.

Next: What Is a Heart Attack?