Читать книгу You: Staying Young: Make Your RealAge Younger and Live Up to 35% Longer - Michael Roizen F. - Страница 26

While most cardio talk is about clots and clogs that tie up traffic in your heart and arteries, there are also toll booths involved – the valves that accept blood coming into and leaving your heart. About 30 percent of people have significant valve disease by the age of eighty-five, just from the wear and tear of shuttling blood into and out of their hearts for all those years. When valves experience a little bit of turbulence over time, they get scarred with calcium and can get stuck like a door with a rusted hinge, disrupting blood flow. You can hear the difference between a good valve and a malfunctioning one through a stethoscope: instead of a rub-dub beat, it’s more of a rub-woooosh sound as blood passes through the diseased valve. (Diagnosis, though, comes after an echocardiogram.) Statins delay the process, and surgery can repair or replace valves. Even better, researchers are developing ways to make those repairs without opening your chest, which cuts back on suture costs, not to mention the ICU stay.

Inflammation plays a role in lots of kinds of heart disease. For example, in atrial fibrillation (an abnormal heart rhythm), the heart’s small upper chambers, which are supposed to receive blood and gently propel it downstream, start looking like bags of worms (see Figure 2.3). Because blood isn’t pushed completely out of the atria, it may pool and clot. Atrial fibrillation is frequently caused by inflammation of the heart wall, and the damage is done by those oxygen free radicals produced by inefficient mitochondria. Arrhythmias can also be caused by a number of other things, including pressure on the walls of the atria or hormonal abnormalities, and can be linked to general inflammation of the heart. No matter the cause, the delicate cables that conduct electricity throughout your heart become swollen and start short-circuiting. You can actually feel arrhythmias as a fluttering of the heart (unassociated with love pangs, of course). Steer clear of bad trans-fat- and saturated-fat-laden fries, burgers and textbook-thick pieces of pie.

Figure 2.3 Bad Beat Irritation caused by inflammatory cells in the right and left atrial chambers of the heart makes the wall swell and electrical circuits short-circuit. The abnormal heart rhythms then cause blood to pool, so clots form, which can lead to strokes.