Coronary artery stenosis is the most common heart disease

What is it? Who gets it? How do you prevent it, and can it be treated? Let’s go ask the medical specialist in cardiothoracic and cardiovascular surgery of Phayathai 2 Hospital, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Kittichai Luengthaviboon, so he can give us some updates. 

The doctor says, “Before, the most common heart disease was rheumatic heart valve stenosis or regurgitation. However, the most common heart disease today is coronary artery stenosis due to fat accumulation in the walls of the coronary arteries and blood clotting that causes sudden coronary artery thrombosis, leading to myocardial infarction. As a result, it has a high mortality rate and requires urgent treatment.”

 

Although heart disease can occur in people from their infancy to 90 years of age, and its frequently encountered age group was young adults, the doctor says that “Today, heart disease is frequently found in middle-aged and elderly people and this is due to a change in causes. Specifically, older patients have comorbidities like hypertension, kidney failure, disability and diabetes that make it more complicated to treat heart disease while increasing the disease’s severity.”

You can be safe if you receive good treatment…

 

Despite the fact that the statistics for this disease are increasing, standard diagnosis and treatment are producing much better outcomes. For example, the doctor says, “Take, for example a patient who arrives with chest pain and congestion. When the patient arrives at the emergency room, we have a plan to diagnose whether it is myocardial infarction by running an electrocardiogram test and blood tests to identify enzymes. If myocardial infarction is the case, anti-platelet or anti-clotting medications will be administered immediately, or else the patient will be sent to receive coronary angiography in order to identify the blocked artery before treating it with a balloon and stent approach. As a result, a heart suffering from acute and severe myocardial infarction can receive blood supply in under 4 hours, so the heart muscles affected can recover and return to normal. Meanwhile, coronary artery stenosis patients who do not arrive with acute myocardial infarction and receive coronary angiography to identify coronary arterial obstruction have been studied so much that we have good and effective treatment guidelines in place. These guidelines are used as a standard in the United States, Europe and the rest of the world. Therefore, we have the best patient treatment options in the short-term and long-term and are recommended by heart  doctors to allow patients and their relatives to choose their preferred treatment based on modern medical knowledge in order to be safe from coronary artery stenosis for as long as possible.”