Learn to modify your lifestyle to achieve a balance in health and enjoyment, learn to accept stress and find ways to manage it in a healthy manner. Age is not something you can control, however you could grow old gracefully
The web of disease causation is devised to address chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension and as we will learn today heart attacks. This, however, can also be adapted to communicable diseases.
Most chronic illnesses do not have a single causative factor but are a group of causative factors. In today’s article, I will try to explain to you the web of disease causation and the multiple pathways which lead to disease using myocardial infarction (heart attacks) as an example.
Every disease has a genetic background, however there are various environmental and behavioural factors which can influence the onset of disease. In case of Myocardial Infarction we basically had three main causative factors, lifestyle, stress and age. We can immediately observe that besides age, the other two factors, lifestyle and stress, are modifiable. As we trace these pathways we will realise that these pathways are interconnected and actually form a web of inter dependent causes.
LIFESTYLE
Let’s try to trace the pathway of lifestyle leading to heart attacks. In today’s world we have abundance of food. Abundance of food leads to obesity. Obesity leads to hyperlipidemias (high LDL cholesterol and high triglyceride levels), this leads to coronary atherosclerosis (heart blockages) which leads to myocardial ischemia (your heart tissue is deprived of oxygen) which leads to myocardial infarction (heart attack).
Myocardial infarction is irreparable damage to parts of heart muscle. Similarly, lack of exercise leads to obesity and follows the same cascade. Smoking leads for hyperlipidemias, smoking leads to hypertension and changes in arterial walls along with increased thrombotic tendencies, which leads to heart blockages and eventually heart attacks.
Thrombocytosis in simple terms means that the platelets which are generally in charge of healing your wounds spontaneously begin to clot within your blood vessels and this leads to blockages of the blood vessel.
STRESS
People who are stressed may take solace in substance abuse such as smoking and then the cascade continues on to an eventual heart attack. Stress may also lead to emotional disturbances, may lead to hypertension, changes in arterial walls, which again eventually leads to heart attacks. Chronic stress may also cause your flight or fight hormones to be chronically increased which over time again leads to damage of your blood vessels.
AGE
At the other end of the spectrum also ageing contributes to hypertension and changes in arterial walls. Age also may manifest other chronic diseases such as diabetes which may further contribute to heart attacks.
As we go down the tree of the web of causation of heart attacks we will soon discover that all the contributing factors are basically interdependent. This kind of web of causation as mentioned earlier can be used for practically any chronic disease and is to portray that there is no single cause for serious health events, but is essentially a group of causative factors often intertwined together.
In conclusion, learn to modify your lifestyle to achieve a balance in health and enjoyment, learn to accept stress and find ways to manage it in a healthy manner. Age is not something you can control, however you could grow old gracefully!
