Nowadays, it is possible to prevent sudden death due to
cardiac arrest.
Cardiac arrest is the sudden loss of cardiac function,
which may result in sudden death. Like an electrical pump, your heart generates
electricity in its upper chamber, sending signals through pathways in your
heart to make all the muscle cells contract at once in order to produce your
heartbeat. Through this intricate process, blood is pumped through your heart
valves into all your body organs so that they, too, can do their work properly.
Any malfunctioning, however, may lead to cardiac arrest, causing sudden death
when the heart stops beating.
A person whose heart has stopped will lose consciousness
and stop normal breathing, and the pulse and blood pressure will be absent.
Sometimes there are no warning signs prior to cardiac arrest, but in other
cases people can experience dizziness or fainting spells. Sudden loss of
consciousness or death often occurs during cardiac arrest.
The good news is that if you can prevent cardiac arrest,
you can prevent sudden death resulting from it. With the advancement of medical
science, it is not difficult to identify the causes of heart disease and the
development of its related health problems. Prevention of heart disease is always
better than the cure. Prevention of heart attacks is avoiding sudden death due
to cardiac arrest. However, the cooperation of the patient is critical to the
prevention of symptomatic coronary artery heart disease. That is to say, the
patient also plays a pivotal part in preventing cardiac arrest, and hence the
possibility of sudden death.
What the patient can do is to modify his or her risk
pattern through lifestyle changes. True enough, the patient cannot change the
genetic factor, the age factor, and the gender factor, but the patient can
change the lifestyle, in particular, the eating habits, to reduce the onset of
symptom-free silent myocardial ischemia as well as symptomatic coronary artery
disease.
The Standard American Diet (SAD) has notably contributed
to one of the most overfed and undernourished populations in the world. More
than 60 million Americans are overweight. Worse, obesity is accompanied by poor
nutrition. With the exception of those few individuals suffering from metabolic
abnormalities, such as under-active thyroid, obesity is just inexcusable
overindulgence of foods loaded with fat and cholesterol. Changing dietary
habits is the solution to problems related to cardiac arrest, including the
potential of sudden death. Dietary therapy may seem to be a simple solution,
yet it is a difficult one to implement. The patient needs to be empowered with
knowledge of cardiac arrest and its relationship to diet.
It is almost impossible to initiate any meaningful dietary
change if the patient does not see the need to do so. In brief, watch your body
weight. Read food labels and consume foods low in calories. Use behavior
modification through mind power to create a "thin mind." Reduce your
dietary cholesterol intake to less than 300 mg per day. Avoid foods rich in
cholesterol, including meats, egg yolks, dairy products, and organ meats, such
as liver. Eat oat bran to facilitate the removal of cholesterol. Avoid
saturated fats, which should be less than 10 percent of the total calories
consumed. Even polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, such as soft
margarine, vegetable oils, should be reduced to a minimum. The total
consumption of fat should be less than 30 percent of the total calories.
Dietary therapy, which is the mainstay of treatment of
heart disease, is always preferred to drug therapy, which is never a long-term
solution to health problems. Only when dietary controls prove ineffective, then
drug therapy should be used. In addition to dietary therapy, exercise therapy
also plays a pivotal part in preventing sudden death due to cardiac arrest.
Despite the controversy over the benefits of exercising, repeated scientific
studies have proved a definitive statistical link between a sedentary lifestyle
and heart attacks.
What you eat and how you live your life may impact the
development of cardiac arrest, which is often the cause of sudden death.
Given the
potential of sudden death, why should you focus your mind on depressive
thoughts about the past or worries about the future? Instead, focus your mind
on what you can do now to avoid any sudden death that may
happen to you if you don’t take care of your health.
Stephen Lau
Copyright© by Stephen Lau
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