Protecting Your Heart Is Your Duty
If you place your hands on your left chest, you should feel your heart beat pounding feom inside your chest but if you aren’t feeling your heartbeat then you must be reading this post from the other side where the dead reside. Anyways you can also enjoy reading this post from over there as it could be helpful to your health just as it is helpful to the living here. That said, the ogan that makes that pump that you feel when you place your hand on your chest is the heart.
For us to live, we need to breath in oxygen and we breath out carbon dioxide. The oxygen we breathe in needs to get to every other part of the body and this is where the heart come into play. The heart collects oxygen rich blood and sends it to the organs that needs it and it also collects deoxygenated blood from the organs and send them to the organs that will oxygenate them again and take away the waste.
The heart does the job of pumping in and out blood about 60 to 100 times every minute from the day you were born to the day you die and join those in the other side. With much work comes breakdown if there is no proper care but before there is a breakdown, there will be certain faults and signs of malfunctioning that might be noticed, and in the case of the heart, it is hypertension.
There is a chance you know one or two persons with this condition or maybe you are even suffering from it. It is a very common heart disease especially in Africa. With blockage in the arteries that takes blood away from the heart comes difficulty in pumping the blood to the body. When this is a common scenario in majority of the arteries in the body, it leads to high blood pressure. When this continues for a long period of time, it can lead to hypertension in the heart, kidney failure in the kidneys and stroke when it affects the brain.
The heart although getting inflammed and having scars as it pumps with force still continues until it reaches a point where it can no longer do function again and that stage is cardiac failure. To know you have hypertension, go to a nearby hospital, or get your blood monitored at home. If your blood pressure reads above 140/90 on more than 2 occasions, then you are at the risk of hypertension.
You are eager to ask what can lead to hypertension, well just like every health condition that isn’t caused by a pathogen or transmitted by a vector, there are two categories of causes. The one that can be controlled and the one that cannot be controlled. Starting wit the one that cannot be controlled, we are looking at family history, genetics, age (people older than 65 years are at a higher risk of hypertension), and race (black people are at a higher risk of suffering from hypertension).
For the things that can be controlled, one of them is consuming excessive salt, not properly exercising is another risk factor that can lead to hypertension, being overweight is another factor that can lead to hypertension, and smoking (either cigarette, shisha, or whatever, smoking doesn’t have a good reputation with our health and with hypertension, it narrows the blood vessels). For the factors that can be controlled, you know what to do to them. For the ones you aren’t doing, start doing them and the ones you are doing that can lead to hypertension, stop them.
One final instruction, you shoild check your blood pressure regularly so you di not suffer from a disease that kills you silently without knowing. Blood pressure is not for the old, it can happen to anyone so always check your blood pressure.
Reference
** https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/high-blood-pressure/the-facts-about-high-blood-pressure
https://www.who.int/health-topics/hypertension#tab
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hypertension
https://www.cdc.gov/heart-disease/about/index.html
https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/exercise-and-the-heart
https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/heart-attack**