cardiovascular disease is a general term that refers to diseases of the cardiovascular system which is basically the heart and blood vessels examples of these diseases include coronary heart disease heart attacks faulty heart valves and heart failure the aim of this video is to take a quick look at these diseases but then mainly focus on the treatments that we can use to fix them which includes stents statins replacement valves and even replacement hearts coronary heart disease is when the coronary arteries which supply blood to the heart muscle start to get blocked by the buildup of layers of fatty material this causes the lumen of the arteries to become narrower so that less blood can flow through which means that less oxygen reaches the heart muscle and as the heart needs lots of oxygen to keep working this can put strain on the heart and potentially cause a heart attack the two main treatments for coronary heart disease are stents and statins a stent is basically an expandable tube that we can place inside the arteries to hold them open which ensures that the blood can keep flowing the benefits of stents are that the surgery is relatively quick and they're effective for a long time the downside though is they do require surgery which always has risks for example the surgery could induce a heart attack or lead to an infection there's also a small risk of the patient later developing a blood clot near the stent which we call a thrombosis estatin on the other hand is a medication that alters the balance of cholesterol in your bloodstream now cholesterol is a type of lipid that we all need in order to be healthy however it comes in two different forms the bad ldl type and the good hdl type the problem is that most people have too much of the bad type which can cause us fatty deposits in our coronary arteries to form meanwhile we tend to have too little of the good cholesterol which can help us get rid of those fatty deposits statins though are able to decrease the amount of bad cholesterol in our blood and increase the good type which lowers the overall risk of not only coronary heart disease but also many other diseases like strokes and heart attacks the downside of statins though is that just like many other medications they have to be taken regularly for years and they can cause side effects such as headaches and kidney failure another thing that can go wrong with the heart is that the valves can get damaged or weakened either naturally over time such as an old age or due to other things like heart attacks and infections the role of a valve if you remember is to allow blood to flow in one direction only so the two main problems that we get with the valves are either that not enough blood can pass through for example because the valve has become stiff so won't open fully or the valve doesn't close properly anymore and so blood can leak backwards regardless of why it's dodgy though we can fix faulty valves by replacing them with new ones which could be biological valves from another human or more likely a pig or can or we could use a man-made mechanical valve both of these are going to require surgery to put them in though and there will be an ongoing risk of blood clots now if things get really bad you may end up with a heart failure which is when the heart isn't able to pump blood around the body properly anymore at this point some medications can help but the only proper treatment is a new heart just like with valves we can replace them with either real biological hearts or man-made ones which we call artificial hearts unfortunately though the artificial hearts aren't that good so they're generally only a temporary fix until you can find them real biological art and this brings us to the second problem which is that we can't use pig or cow hearts so we have to find a donor heart for another human which can take ages and even if we do find a donor heart and we undergo a successful heart transplant the heart could still be rejected by our body's immune system as i might see the heart as foreign and try to destroy it this brings us to one of the few advantages of artificial hearts because they're made of metals in plastic rather than living tissue our immune system doesn't try to destroy them sometimes people require a heart and lung transplant if the lungs are also diseased but as you can imagine it's hard to find a donor heart and donor lungs and the surgery involved be really complicated and those are all the horrible heart problems that we're going to cover if you found this useful then give us a like and subscribe and we'll see you next time