You can think of your heart as a complicated little room with little doors everywhere leading in and leading out. The doors allow the blood to go where it needs to go, to keep you healthy and strong. When your blood is flowing healthy and strong, you are healthy and strong. When those doors are opening and closing like they should, you feel happy, energetic, and clearheaded. On the other hand, if the doors are squeaky, if the bolts are rusted, if the hinges haven’t been oiled properly in a long time, you can have severe problems. Eventually, your heart could fail completely.
One key way of keeping your heart healthy is eating healthily. Eating healthily means eating fresh, natural foods. Another key is exercise. Getting out in the fresh air, getting the blood pumping, will keep your heart healthy, will keep the hinges oiled. A third way, which is not as often thought about, is education about heart health. Knowing about the different negative conditions that effect the heart can lead you to heading off problems before they really cause you trouble.
If you think of your heart as a room with doors leading in and out of it, there is one little door in particular, located on the left side of the heart, that can get you into trouble. This door brings in blood from the upper parts of the heart. It allows blood from the upper parts of the heart to flow freely.
If this door, therefore, becomes weak or diseased, the blood can slosh back through it, can slosh back into the heart, causing you severe problems. It sloshes back into the upper chamber. This process is known in the medical world as regurgitation. Now your heart has to work twice as hard to pump properly, because it has all that extra blood to deal with. It’s got to work overtime, as it were, with all the doors opening and shutting twice as often. As you know, if you overwork any machine it will eventually break down. Your heart is no different. Mitral valve regurgitation will eventually wear you heart down, it can break it down completely.
There are two kinds of mitral valve regurgitation. The first kind, which is called chronic mitral valve regurgitation, is something that develops over a long period of time. It happens slowly, it just creeps in, it doesn’t happen all at once. Chronic mitral valve regurgitation is caused by a few different things:
1. Mitral valve prolapse means, basically, that the little door on the lower part of you heart opens the wrong way, then bulges and gets stuck, so that the blood creeps back in again.
2. Heart failure is a common cause of mitral valve regurgitation.
3. Rheumatic fever is a common and terrible cause of mitral valve regurgitation. What happens in this case is, the fever scars your heart in various ways and keeps the doors from shutting all the way, once again leading to blood gushing back into the heart and overworking it.
The second kind of mitral valve regurgitation is called acute mitral valve regurgitation. Acute mitral valve regurgitation happens very, very quickly, and can lead to death. When this happens, the little door in your heart ruptures without warning. The shock to your heart when all that blood flows back in is sometimes too much for it; it gets overloaded. If you don’t get to a doctor right away, acute mitral valve regurgitation can be deadly. Heart attacks are common causes of acute mitral valve regurgitation.