Heart Disease | Biology for All | FuseSchool

CREDITS Animation & Design: Bing Rijper Narration: Dale Bennet Script: Gemma Young Click here to see more videos: https://alugha.com/FuseSchool Let’s start with coronary heart disease or CHD in short. It’s when fatty deposits build up in your coronary arteries (aka very important arteries!), making them narrower and therefore reducing blood flow to the heart muscle. This is bad news. Less blood flow means less oxygen to the heart’s muscles, so less aerobic respiration. This means that the poor heart has to work extra hard to get energy! High blood pressure puts extra pressure on the arteries walls, making them even more susceptible to narrowing. This happens because if your blood pressure is too high, the muscles in the artery need to respond by pushing back harder and so they become more muscular and so there is less space for blood to flow through. Combined with coronary heart disease, this can lead to heart attacks, or worse, death. Well, there are a number of factors, including age, smoking, diet and physical activity. The older you are and the more you smoke, the higher the chances. Diet and physical activity also have a big effect on blood pressure, as well as cholesterol, and weight - all of which are risk factors of coronary heart disease. To keep blocked arteries open, stents can be used. They’re inserted by something called a catheter, a thin and flexible long tube. It’s fed through an artery until it reaches the blocked section. A small The balloon inside the stent is inflated, pushing the plaque and fatty deposits against the artery wall. The stent is a metal cage, which then holds the artery open. This allows more blood to flow through. The catheter is then removed, leaving the stent in place. Although stents are very useful, they do come with some risks. Statins are a pill used to lower cholesterol. They work in two ways. Firstly by slowing down the production of cholesterol by the liver, reducing the amount of bad LDL cholesterol circulating in the blood. They also stabilize and slow down the rate of fatty deposits in the arteries. In fact, they’re the most commonly prescribed drug in the UK and second most in the US. Statins reduce the risk of developing CHD and minimizes its effect, but, again, there are possible side-effects… The job of heart valves is to prevent the backflow of blood. Sometimes one or more of these valves stops doing its job properly. And when this happens, many people need little or no treatment but sometimes surgery is needed. Surgery can either repair a valve or be a full valve replacement. Replacement valves can be man-made or from a donor. These biological replacement valves may be preferred as they don’t damage red-blood cells, but, are also known to harden and need replacing every 10 to 20 years. Mechanical is a lot more durable, but, patients have to constantly take anti-blood clotting drugs and some even say they can hear their own valves! If someone’s heart is seriously damaged, they’ll need a new one. This is known as a transplant. This is done by removing their heart, and connecting the new one to the aorta and the pulmonary artery. Can you spot the potential problem in this process? Pause the video and have a think. Whilst surgery is going on, the patient won’t have a heart! This is solved by connecting the patient to a heart-lung bypass machine, which takes over the job of the heart and lungs. So there we have heart disease, the treatments and their risks. Coronary heart disease & high blood pressure VISIT us at www.fuseschool.org, where all of our videos are carefully organised into topics and specific orders, and to see what else we have on offer. Comment, like and share with other learners. You can both ask and answer questions, and teachers will get back to you. These videos can be used in a flipped classroom model or as a revision aid. Twitter: https://twitter.com/fuseSchool Access a deeper Learning Experience in the FuseSchool platform and app: www.fuseschool.org Friend us: http://www.facebook.com/fuseschool This Open Educational Resource is free of charge, under a Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC ( View License Deed: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ). You are allowed to download the video for nonprofit, educational use. If you would like to modify the video, please contact us: info@fuseschool.org

LicenseCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial