Heart Disease Symptoms

People with heart disease frequently suffer sleep disturbances because they’re anxious, in pain, experiencing breathing problems or just worried. Studies have indicated that people who suffer from long-term sleep deprivation increases blood pressure and alters blood sugar and hormone levels in the bloodstream, all of which may contribute to the development of heart problems

So, ironically, chronic sleep deprivation may cause heart disease just as heart disease can cause sleep deprivation.

The frequent cessation of breathing from sleep apnea can deprive vital organs, including the heart of oxygen needed to circulate the blood around the body. These factors put quite a lot of stress on the heart and can begin to beat irregularly, going into ventricular arrhythmia (v-tach)

V-tach is a potentially fatal arrhythmia and essentially is a medical emergency that can be deadly if the heart doesn’t return to normal rhythm by itself or isn’t shocked back into normal rhythm in time.

Overtime, a heart that’s working so hard under such adverse conditions may become enlarged as it struggles to keep up with the body’s demands. People with enlarged hearts may end up with congestive heart failure, where the heart is too weak to effectively pump the volume of blood the body needs to keep functioning.

Also, specific sleep-related breathing disorders are associated with congestive heart failure. Breathing may wax and wane in response to oversensitivity to carbon dioxide in the blood. This pattern of breathing is associated with high risk of mortality and needs aggressive treatment.

According to a published study, people who sleep less than 5 hours or more than 9 hours each night have a 45% higher risk of developing heart disease.

Perhaps you already have a pacemaker due to earlier problems with your heartbeat, or maybe you survived 1 heart attack. Living with heart disease can be very difficult from a psychological standpoint and nagging fears about your own mortality can make a good night sleep difficult.

Anxiety and excessive worry about your health can make lying down and falling asleep much more difficult if you have a heart or circulatory problem. Cardiac patients whose worries are keeping them awake at night can benefit from anxiety-management training

In several cases, your doctor may prescribe an anti-anxiety medication and sleep aid to help you get a good night’s sleep

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 1:44 pm and is filed under heart disease info, heart disease statistics, reverse heart disease, reversing heart disease. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.