Prevent the progression

In the current scenario of a busy lifestyle and people being ignorant about their lifestyle, it’s a moral and humane responsibility of a doctor to guide the human population about some alarming events they might be going through physically without being aware of the circumstances that the condition can lead to.

Normally we see people being diagnosed with heart failure, liver failure, or kidney failure at the age of 50 living a normal life. Still, because of ignorance of initial symptoms, the silent disease can lead to a major progression and reach a stage where it might be unable to reverse.

To make people aware let’s first see what an organ failure is:

Heart failure is an inability of the heart to pump blood efficiently.

Kidney failure is an inability to filter/remove unnecessary products from blood efficiently.

Liver failure is the inability to perform its functions including blood purifying, the role of metabolism, blood clotting, etc.

So, any organ failure tends to compensate on its own, the heart tries to compensate by increasing its pumping frequency, and the liver tries to bypass itself by forming collaterals.

Now when these organs reach the maximum capacity of their own to compensate they give up and start giving you signs that might alarm you but these symptoms are usually being ignored by people because of the current lifestyle of people being extremely busy and not keeping their health priority.

To make you more understand, here is a graphical representation of our body’s circulatory system.

Now as described vital organs, that is, the kidney, heart and liver are connected to each other in the circulatory system so when one gets affected it will affect the other two.

Any of the failures will lead to circulatory error and lead to circulatory failure.

So the veins collect blood from our lower body and it will take the blood to liver and from there it will further take up to heart from where it goes to lungs to get oxygenated and from where it comes back to heart and then to whole body and towards kidneys to get purified.

Now at any level if an organ goes into failure the first thing you will observe is inability to of blood from lower body to reach upper levels so the fluid component from blood will leak out from the vessels and it will make both lower limbs swell that is known as bilateral pedal edema, so whenever anyone who is connected to you whether family, friends or any colleagues or staff gets swelling in both of their legs immediately ask them to consult a doctor and go for 2-D ECHO, Liver function test and Kidney function test and if any of the above is abnormal you have identified a way more serious and complicated condition at a lot more early stage which can be cured and prevented by medications.

Furthermore, if not identified early this failure can lead to residual blood in heart because of its inefficiency to pump so after repeated pumping cycle the collected blood will create the resistance for blood coming from lungs towards heart and ultimately blood will be collected in lungs also which will also make the fluid part of blood to leak around lungs and give rise to inability or difficulty in breathing.

That’s where your patient is considered critical as the disease/condition has progressed beyond managing it with just medications.

So always be attentive enough to any abnormal signs your or your loved one’s body gives to them and be alert and take proper actions before it’s too late.

Stay tuned for my next blog.

Thanks.
Dr. Harshdev Gadhvi