A Hole In the Heart, Part I

By ANISH KOKA, MD Strokes are the third leading cause of death in the United States. 800,000 people suffer a stroke every year, and the consequences are frequently devastating. Lives are not just lost, but changed forever – speech permanently silenced, arms and legs turned into useless appendages. The brain is very expensive real estate and it is little surprise that a clot the size of a pinhead lodged in a blood vessel feeding the brain is all that is needed to wreak a devastation most fear worse than death. Most of the time the source of the debris that results in a stroke can be readily identified, but at least one-third of the time no source can be found. These have been termed cryptogenic strokes by the medical community mostly because it is an intelligent sounding phrase when your doctor does not know why something happened. Almost 30% of strokes in patients under the age of 55 are found to be cryptogenic. Until the mid 80’s there was little progress in identifying the cause of these strokes, but around the same time I was wondering why Duran Duran was running through jungles in Sri Lanka on MTV, cardiologists began injecting air into the heart to shed light on this mystery. Understanding why watching bubbles travel through the heart was of such interest to cardiologists relies on understanding that the heart and vascular system is a house divided. The four chambers of the heart are divided between de-oxygenated blood on the right side of the heart, and oxygenated ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs