Ailments and Situations - Heart Attack

 

(also referred to as...)

Myocardial Infarction

 
Description

A heart attack is a potentially deadly manifestation of cardiovascular disease -- the single greatest killer in North America. It is responsible for more than one third of all deaths in the continent. The technical term for heart attack is myocardial infarction, meaning literally: death of heart tissue due to a lack of blood (myocardial=heart tissue, infarction=tissue death due to a lack of blood). To be more precise, it is the lack of oxygen, carried by the bloodstream, that results in the death of heart tissue.

A heart attack occurs when that oxygenated blood cannot be delivered to a certain part of your heart. Although your heart is responsible for supplying blood to every other part of your body, it too must be fed. The oxygen deprivation is caused by a blockage in one or more of your coronary arteries -- the direct suppliers of blood to your heart. Unfortunately, your other arteries cannot supply this missing oxygen. Each coronary artery supplies a particular area of the heart with blood, and no more. If one of these arteries fails to deliver, there is no backup plan; the portion of the heart fed by that artery starves, and if the blood supply is not quickly restored, the muscle tissue in that area dies and is lost for life. A major heart attack will kill one out of three of its victims.

 

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