Reversing heart disease can be done by adopting a few lifestyle changes. By avoiding certain risk factors that put you in harm’s way of the disease to begin with, you can turn back the clock, so to speak, and continue to live a long, healthy life despite having a heart disease.

There are many different kinds of heart disease, but one of the factors that leads to most heart disease is a blockage to the arteries that feed blood to the heart. When the heart no longer gets a fresh supply of blood, it can die, and the result is a heart attack. By unclogging these arteries, you are essentially reversing heart disease and, therefore, healing your heart.

How You Can Reverse Heart Disease

Diets high in saturated fats and cholesterol can contribute to the blockage that causes most diseases of the heart. Reversing heart disease can be as simple as cleaning up your diet, by eating more fruits and vegetables, foods with a higher fiber content, and staying away from foods with too much saturated fat. By changing to a cleaner diet, you are one step closer to reversing a heart disease that has already claimed so many lives.

Another technique that works in reversing heart disease is getting more exercise. When you exercise, you increase your cardiovascular health, and your heart begins to work better. Exercise can be had anywhere, anytime, simply walk instead of drive your car, take the stairs instead of the elevator, or just walk around the block every night after dinner.

A more drastic move for reversing heart disease is surgery. Surgeons have been able to unblock arteries or bypass clogged arteries to improve blood flow to the heart.

In many cases, surgery helps those who are afflicted with this horrible disease; however, for surgery to be effective, the heart disease must be caught early, just like most other diseases. Surgery can be an effective means for reversing heart disease, but the most effective way is to adopt good living habits once you find out you have it.

By adopting good living habits, eating right, getting more exercise, and reducing stress levels, you can go on to live a long, healthy, productive life even if you already have heart disease. Reversing heart disease does not need to inhibit your life or hold you back in any way; instead, by adopting good living habits, you can improve your life by turning back time to look and feel better.

Heart disease is perhaps the nation’s most prevalent killer of men and women. Because of this, there is constant research being conducted to find a cure for heart disease. Although there is no official cure as of yet, a few procedures and treatments do show a great deal of promise.

A Simple Potential Cure for Heart Disease

Recent studies have indicated that the same methods used to prevent heart disease can possibly be a way to cure heart disease. These studies indicate that a drastic change in diet and exercise practices can in fact reverse or even cure heart disease.

One such program is the one presented by Dean Ornish Program. Based on a whole food and plant based diet, this program provides a very regimented and regulated plan as a cure for heart disease. According to this program, there are a number of steps that are necessary to reverse the affect of this killer disease.

The first is to lower the fat intake to 10% of your daily calorie intake. This action alone has been shown to lower cholesterol, and help with hypertension, both major contributing factors of heart disease. Also, this plan calls for lowering the intake of dietary cholesterol by a drastic amount. In addition, this program calls for a regular amount of soy protein, usually amounting to 15% of your daily calorie intake.

In addition to some drastic dietary changes, this program also calls for at least 30 minutes of strenuous exercise per day to help maintain a healthy weight and body condition. All these factors, as well as quitting smoking and drinking, in small quantities appear to be very promising techniques for a cure for heart disease.

Of course, the body is not the only part of you involved with finding a cure for heart disease. Many studies indicate that joining a support group and having the encouragement of family and friends is a fantastic way to help beat this disease. Different stress management techniques such as meditation, anger management, and even being among friends are great ways to help in the cure for heart disease.

Surgical Options

Of course, occasionally for various reasons, drastic changes in diet or exercise practices are not really available to the patient. Diet and exercise should always be the first change made in finding a cure for heart disease, but sometimes surgery might be a possibility.

Although surgery is drastic, and it doesn’t always fix the underlying problem of bad diet or poor exercise habits that contributed to the disease, it can be one method for a cure for heart disease. One such common surgery is that of angioplasty. This procedure uses a tiny balloon to push open blocked arteries around the heart to aid in the flow of blood, and help in the cure for heart disease.

Another surgical method that is gaining popularity in the cure for heart disease is that of bypass surgery. In this procedure, small pieces of veins or arteries are taken from another portion of the body, sometimes the arms or legs, and used to create a ‘bypass’ for the blood around the blocked blood vessel.

Which is Right for You?

Which cure for heart disease is correct for you can only be decided by consulting with your chosen medical professional, and perhaps even consulting a cardiologist would be in order. Most likely the best cure for heart disease would be a combination of exercise diet, and surgical options as outlined by your doctor.

Heart disease includes plaque-blocked arteries, congenital conditions, arrhythmia, and diseases of the actual heart muscle. Whether heart disease is detected early or not revealed until after heart failure, doctors have many kinds of remedies and treatments to reduce the risks of further heart disease. Broadly defined, there are three categories of heart disease treatment.

Take Two and Call Me in the Morning

If your heart is beating too quickly, or if the arteries around it contract tightly, the heart will be overtaxed, like revving an engine that’s in park. Doctors prescribe three classes of pills called nitrates, beta blockers, and calcium channel blockers to let the heart run efficiently. Each of these types of heart disease treatments help the heart to beat regularly and slowly, or expand the arteries in the area of the heart so that blood flow is more regular.

Everyone has seen TV ads promoting Aspirin to thin the blood and reduce the risk of blood clots causing blocked arteries. While Aspirin does diminish the blood’s ability to form clots, other drugs fight cholesterol, which can form plaque in the arteries and lead to heart failure. These drugs are usually simply called cholesterol reducing drugs or are part of a subcategory called statins.

As always, if your doctor prescribes medicine, remember to ask plenty of questions about what the drug is and what it does.

Scalpel, Please

When clogged cardiac arteries are life threatening, heart disease treatment can mean going into surgery. Some surgeries will clear the plaque in the arteries by cleaning or grinding it away or inflating a balloon in the arteries to break up the plaque. Bypass surgeries take a large blood vessel from elsewhere in the body and graft it to the blocked artery so blood can pass to the heart.

Surgeries for other conditions include implanting a pacemaker into the heart to treat arrhythmia, and doctors can transplant aortic valves into a patient whose valve has stopped functioning properly. In case no heart disease treatment is possible, such as in infants born with heart defects, artificial hearts do exist, though they are only a temporary solution until a heart transplant can be performed.

Treat The Whole System

Of course, before your heart gets desperate enough to need drugs or surgery, look to the risk factors you can control. Don’t smoke; control your cholesterol so that plaque never gets a chance to clog your arteries; and exercise regularly, most days in a week, to keep your heart muscles healthy. Then maybe you might never need to know about heart disease treatment.