Cardiovascular disease, which affects nearly half of adults in the United States, casts a wide net and includes a range of conditions, from high blood pressure to more serious heart disease.
Somewhere in this mix are heart valve diseases, which are diagnosed in 5 million Americans each year.
Given this large prevalence, the team at Advanced Cardiovascular Specialists thought it would be a good idea to review some of the more common signs of potential heart valve disease.
Since many of the symptoms of heart valve disease are similar to other cardiovascular issues, we urge you not to ignore any of the signs we outline below.
Before we get into the potential side effects of heart valve disease, let’s quickly review what this category of cardiovascular disease is all about.
Your heart is an organ that’s made up of four chambers — two upper atria and two lower ventricles. These chambers work in concert to pump blood through your heart and lungs to pick up oxygen and then they push it out into your body. To connect these chambers and your blood vessels, you have four heart valves:
When you have an issue in any of these four valves, it usually boils down to one of two problems:
Many roads lead to heart valve disease, including congenital, degenerative, and infectious causes.
In many cases, heart valve disease develops over time, but you may not initially feel any symptoms. As the valve becomes more diseased and its function becomes increasingly compromised, you can experience:
As you can see, this list of symptoms is shared among many different cardiovascular issues, which makes sense because these are all side effects of a heart that isn’t functioning optimally.
With heart valve disease, blood may not be circulating through your body well, and your heart might be forced to work harder to push blood through faulty valves. In fact, valve disease can lead to heart failure.
So, any time you’re experiencing any of the symptoms we describe above, it’s important to come see us so that we can identify and treat the issue to get your blood flowing better.
How we go about treating valvular disease depends largely on which valve is affected and what symptoms you’re encountering.
To give you an idea about some of the options, we can treat heart valve disease with medications and lifestyle changes to start. If the valve issue gets more serious, we can try opening the valve more with a minimally invasive balloon procedure or we can surgically repair or replace the valve.
As you can see, there are plenty of great options for heart valve disease and, as with most cardiovascular issues, the earlier we can treat the problem the better.
So, for expert diagnosis and treatment of valvular heart disease, we invite you to contact our office in Mountain View, California, to schedule an appointment with one of our heart health experts today.
