Avoiding Heart Bypass Surgery
By Adam Leeds
Although you've heard this time and time before, here it comes again: the best way to avoid heart bypass surgery is to keep your heart healthy! This is particularly true if either parent had heart disease or if a brother or sister needed bypass surgery.
The best tactic for avoiding heart bypass surgery is to stop smoking now! Cigarette smoking and heart disease (along with other problems such as poor circulation in the legs) go hand in hand. After two years of not smoking, your risk of heart disease drops to the same level as those that have never smoked.
Another way to avoid heart bypass surgery is to take care of any other medical conditions that you might have, particularly high blood pressure (hypertension) and Type II (non-insulin requiring) diabetes. Untreated or poorly-controlled cases of these diseases are known to increase the risk for heart disease. African-American males are at greater risk of developing heart disease if either, or both, of these conditions are present.
Your diet can also help you avoid heart surgery. Avoid foods that contain large amounts of "bad (LDL)" cholesterol such as eggs, red meat, or dairy products. A daily multi-vitamin supplement will that assure your body is getting the chemicals that it needs to function properly. If your physician has prescribed medication to lower your cholesterol, take it as directed..
Starting a daily exercise program can also help you avoid bypass surgery by burning those extra calories that would normally be stored as fats or complex forms of sugar.
If, however, you are faced with the need for heart bypass surgery there are a number of options and alternatives that were not available as recently as a few years ago.
The most widely-known of these alternatives is angioplasty, in which a tiny balloon is used to open a narrowed artery. Recently, the types of obstructions that can be successfully treated has been shown to be greater than was previously thought and angioplasty is being used in cases that were once thought to require surgery.
In "traditional" heart bypass surgery (coronary artery bypass grafting, CABG, and pronounced "cabbage") the heart is temporarily stopped during the most delicate period of the operation, when the bypass grafts are attached to the diseased arteries, and the rest of the body is supported by a pumping machine that takes over the function of the heart and lungs.
In many cases heart bypass surgery can now be done "off pump" while the heart is immobilized by a special "cradle." When the "off-pump" technique is used, the patients tend to recover faster, have fewer complications, and go home an average of a day earlier than those that undergo the "traditional" operation.
Finally, advances in medical therapy are proving to provide the same benefits as bypass surgery in a selected class of conditions, particularly those patients considered to be "high risk" because of other conditions.
Although often a life-saving procedure, there are now a number of options available for avoiding heart bypass surgery. Ask your physician whether these procedures are an option in your case.
Adam Leeds is an accomplished niche website developer and author. To learn more about heart bypass surgery, please visit Heart Health Blog for current articles and discussions.
