Can the heart adapt?!


Question: what i mean is if it gets damaged can it adapt or work differently to continue to meet the cardiac requirements of the body?


Answers: what i mean is if it gets damaged can it adapt or work differently to continue to meet the cardiac requirements of the body?

When someone with coronary artery disease has a blockage forming, it takes time. (When that plaque ruptures, the person has a heart attack.) Not everyone with plaque build-up in their coronary arteries has a heart attack. So, over time while this plaque is accumulating, sometimes the heart forms what's called "Collateral" arteries.

These collaterals are a natural bypass of the blockage. This, too, takes time (which is why people having a heart attck frequently don't have such vessels), and collaterals don't always provide enough blood to the heart when the person then exercises (which is why they may still have chest pain); they get enough blood (oxygen) the heart during everyday activity/ non-strenuous.

Yep. For instance, people who have had heart attacks that have damaged parts of their heart can still lead relatively normal lives, to a point.
Children, myself included, with defects that cannot be fixed can still live normal lives.
(I have only one ventricle and one atria)
It depends on the amount of compromise. If there is not enough working muscle, than no, of course it can't adapt to ANYTHING, but it can adapt to a surprising amount of things.

Hi,
I am a doctor..
Yes of course, this can happen..
when there is a heart attack. part of the heart dies..
but then, the remainder of the heart adapts so that it can do the previous workload..
there is either cell proliferation or the remaining cells enlarge(hypertrophy) in size to cope with this..

but this is not possible all the time..
there is a certain extent this could happen..
if a large segment of the heart dies, then the remainder may not be able to do the job..then there may be immediate heart failure..
so the person may die immediately..

sometimes this may be happen over a period of time..
there may be loss of function of the heart over a period of time..
so the heart may try to compensate this..
but with time, the compensating ability will get less and people develop heart failure..

for people who had repeated heart attacks, evry time a part of the heart dies, so the rest of the heart has got more work load..
so the possibilty of going to heart failure is more..
because there is a limit that the heart can compensate.

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