Heart disease; for you and your family, the diagnosis can be life changing. At ATS Medical, we understand and we’re here to help. Though it is not intended to replace the advice or instructions of your health care professionals, we want to provide you with the kind of information that will make you well informed when you see your cardiologist and cardiac surgeon. Our interest is in helping you understand your choices so that you can make the best care decision possible.
ATS Medical is focused on meeting the needs of the cardiac surgeons and their patients. That dedicated focus affords us the opportunity to discover, develop and deliver the most advanced and beneficial products and services in the world for the improvement of care. Our dedication is driven by the idea that the solutions we create could one day benefit our own precious families as much as they do you and yours.
Heart Disease in General Terms
Heart disease is a very broad description of a variety of medical conditions that affect the heart. These conditions – or diseases – may be structural or they may be functional. Anything that damages the heart can make it less efficient, reducing its ability to fill or pump and causing disruption of the oxygen supply to the whole body. Heart disease may take the form of arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat), embolism (a blood clot), dilation (stretching of the chambers) or hypertrophy (thickening of walls of the heart). It may also affect the body’s ability to keep up with demand for oxygen and the removal of waste products and can result in insufficient contraction (not emptying or filling completely), pain, regurgitation (backflow of blood), stenosis (narrowing of heart openings) and permanent impairment or loss of heart tissue. Heart disease may be due to atherosclerosis (hardening and narrowing of the arteries), autoimmune conditions, bacterial or viral infections, congenital abnormalities, diabetes, unbalanced diets high in fat and cholesterol, hypertension, injury or trauma, sedentary lifestyle, smoking, thyroid dysfunction, family history, drug and alcohol abuse or toxins. See sections on heart valve disease and surgical treatment of atrial fibrillation for further information.
A Healthy Heart is an Efficient Pump
The heart is one of your body’s most important organs. It is the vascular system’s main pump. Blood pumped by your heart carries oxygen and energy to the brain, muscles and internal organs. It takes blood only one minute to make a full circuit of your body. The human heart is comprised of four unique chambers separated by four individual heart valves that regulate the direction and flow of blood through the heart. Your heartbeat is a distinctive two-part sound caused by the opening and closing of its valves. Astonishingly, the heart beats more than 100,000 times a day, requiring the heart valves to open and close nearly one million times a week.
Valves Make Everything Work Properly
Healthy heart valves keep blood flowing efficiently through the heart. The four human heart valves are fibrous tissue flaps that allow one-way movement of blood through the four heart chambers. Healthy heart valves open fully to let blood flow forward to the next chamber and then close to prevent blood from flowing backward. When heart valves are sick, the heart has to work harder to maintain proper blood flow. See section on heart valve disease for further information.
