Heart disease is one of the most life-threatening diseases which takes more than 18 million lives all around the world every single year. In the US alone, it took about 647,000 lives last year. This means one person in the US dies from a heart attack or other heart-related diseases every 35 seconds. However, according to WHO, almost 90% of those heart diseases could have been prevented from manifesting if the patients maintained a healthy lifestyle. And this is where CBD can help.
Although we still don’t have any conclusive studies, other clinical studies have proven that CBD might work well to prevent the primary reasons for which we develop heart problems. But to what extent it can help us?
In this article, we’re going to discuss heart attacks and other heart diseases and how CBD might help us maintain our heart health.
Let’s begin…
What Is Heart Disease And Heart Attack?
How CBD Impacts On Heart Health And Prevents Heart Attack
In modern medicine, doctors use heart disease to refer to every sort of disease that involves our heart or our blood vessels. While others use this to refer only to the disease involving the heart or more specifically coronary artery disease.
While heart disease might be used to refer to any defect or disbalance in our cardiovascular system, we’ll limit our focus specifically to the problems related to our hearts.
Our hearts have one and only jobs. And this is to constantly pump blood and send it through our bodies in a systematic manner. This way, the heart helps to make the blood reach all over our bodies and supply every single body and brain cell with the right amount of nutrients to survive and grow. And our hearts have to do this job relentlessly.
So, if the heart faces some kind of problem that deters it from continuing its job, it will affect our entire body. If our heart stops working for just a few minutes, we might suffer from significant consequences. In fact, if our heart stops for 5-6 minutes, our brain won’t get its necessary oxygen and nutrients. And then, our brains will stop working and we’ll be dead.
So, before we move any further, we have to understand some of the common heart diseases including heart attacks.
What Are Some Common Heart Disease?
Before you start using CBD for better heart health, you must know how many different kinds of diseases can affect your heart. While there are many different diseases your heart may suffer, some problems show up more frequently than others.
In this section, we’ll talk about the 6 most common heart diseases and how it affects our heart. So, let’s get started…
Angina
One of the several symptoms of CAD or coronary artery disease, angina is a medical condition when one or more arteries of our hearts get blocked. As time passes, the blockage in our artery gradually increases or the heart requires more blood to get through the blocked area. As a result, the patient might feel pain in the chest, jaw, or the left arm including severe nausea.
When the arteries face blockage of up to 70%, the patients will start to face pain in their chest. And this symptom will remain the same until the heart clears the blockage on its own. If you’re facing this symptom over an over, then you have to act fast. This might eventually lead to another serious heart disease like stroke or heart attack.
Cardiomyopathy
This is a special heart condition in which the heart muscles lose their ability to contract effectively. As a result, the heart doesn’t work properly and our body cells don’t get enough oxygen to stay healthy for a long time.
Congenital Heart Disease
Congenital heart disease causes serious heart dysfunction that develops while the patients in their fetal developmental state. Therefore, the patient born with this heart disease as a baby and might requires surgical treatment.
Atrial Fibrillation
You’ve probably heard about heart palpitations before. Well, that’s actually atrial fibrillation that causes irregular heartbeat. In this disease, someone’s heart faces a significant electric activity disruption. As a result, the patient feels as if his heart missed one or more beats.
Atrial fibrillation isn’t as light-threatening like other heart diseases. However, if you don’t do anything to treat it, it might cause you to suffer from heart attacks in the later stage of your life. According to various studies, atrial fibrillation causes one-third of all strokes in Americans over 60 years old.
Past heart attacks, anxiety, and old age are some of the leading reasons why people might develop atrial fibrillation.
Heart Attack
When the flow of blood to the heart tissues gets blocked because of a blood clot, the heart muscles suffer from a lack of oxygen. And this eventually causes a heart attack in a person. The muscles of our heart work relentlessly to make sure our whole body gets enough nutrients and oxygen through the blood.
But to do that, your heart muscles need a continuous oxygen and nutrient supply. And if the flow of blood carrying those essential things stops, even for a small time like a few minutes, the heart muscles will start losing their sync and energy. And the cells of the heart muscles will eventually start to die. Then we can call it a heart attack
If this situation continues for the next couple of hours, then the result can be severely dangerous. And even if doctors remove the clot, the patient is required to be kept under strict observation. However, even after the patient is discharged from the hospital, the damage done to the heart tissues can permanently lower the quality of life.
Heart Failure
Heart failure is a serious health condition where a person’s heart becomes weak and unable to effectively pump blood all over the body. And this happens to someone’s heart if that person’s heart suffers from damage caused by either a heart attack or high blood pressure. If someone has a blood pressure which is too high, it puts a lot of pressure to the arteries. And this weakens the heart over time which results in heart failure.
Heart failure has several side effects. And the kind of side effects depends on the side of the heart that suffers from the damage due to heart failure.
- If the right side gets damaged due to heart failure, then the person will suffer from shortness of breath, pulmonary edema, and severe coughing.
- If the left side suffers from the damage, then blood will pool in our body’s right side, especially our right leg and arm.
What May Cause A Heart Attack And Other Heart Diseases?
There is no one fixed reason why someone might suffer from heart diseases. Someone with extremely high blood pressure might develop heart problems. On the other hand, you might also suffer from a heart attack and other heart diseases if you consume too much carbohydrate and sodium. Here are some common reasons someone might develop a heart disease:
- Too much alcohol consumption
- Diabetes
- Auto-immune diseases
- High blood pressure
- Eating a diet that has more sodium than the daily recommended limit.
- Eating snacks with transfat.
- Bacterial Infection
- Viral Infection
- Chronic Anxiety
- Problems with metabolism
- Consuming too much-refined carbohydrates.
- Smoking
- And the side effects of other medicines
How CBD Might Be Beneficial For Heart Disease
How CBD Impacts On Heart Health And Prevents Heart Attack
Now, you already know that heart diseases have many different types. Some of heart diseases might not be too much of a concern, but others can be fatal.
And thanks to the growing popularity of CBD, scientists have conducted some clinical studies to see if it can keep some of the side effects of heart diseases at bay. Although CBD can’t help us treat heart attacks and other heart diseases directly, it might reduce the intensity of heart problems. And in some cases, it can even help us treat the main cause of heart disease.
For example, CBD can be a great medical supplement for people with atrial fibrillation. This specific heart disease is caused because of extreme anxiety and inflammatory problems. And CBD has proven to have great anti-anxiety and anti-inflammatory properties. So, consuming CBD greatly reduces the chances of suffering from atrial fibrillation.
For now, there isn’t much research on CBD’s effect on heart health and we still have a lot to learn. But according to current studies, CBD might help us improve our heart health in the following ways:
- CBD reduces inflammation.
- It helps us maintain a stable glucose level in our bodies.
- CBD relieves stress and anxiety. As a result, it helps us keep our blood pressure related to our emotions at check.
- It helps us lose weight.
- It relieves the arteries of oxidative stress.
However, please note that CBD might interact with your current medicines if you’re taking any. So, always consult a doctor before start taking CBD to maintain heart health.
What Are The Best Ways To Take CBD For Heart Attack?
How CBD Impacts On Heart Health And Prevents Heart Attack
CBD can be taken in many different ways including tinctures, capsules, vaping, topical, or in edible form. While all of them are effective except the topical form, some form of taking CBD is more effective for heart diseases than others.
To get the most out of CBD, it needs to be directly in your bloodstream. And Capsules, tinctures, and edible forms of CBD are the best way to achieve that.
Also, if you use CBD in tincture form or with your juice or coffee, you can control the exact amount of drops you want to consume per day. And the same thing can be said about the capsule too. So, if you intend to take CBD for your heart health, it would be best to take it in tincture or capsule form.
Conclusion
While we still have to wait for more conclusive clinical studies, we can still use CBD to control the underlying reasons why we suffer from heart attacks and other heart-related issues.
However, it’s never wise to take CBD on your own if you’re already suffering from heart disease. And that’s because CBD might interact with your current medications. So, go check with your doctor. And if the doctor approves it, you can buy third-party tested CBD products from a reputed company and keep the heart attack miles away.
Disclaimer: The information above should not be considered a medical recommendation. The content is written to enrich the reader’s knowledge. Any use of materials and content mentioned in this article should be first consulted about by a physician.
