![]() ![]() ![]() The thing is, it’s rare for domestic animals to have high cholesterol. If a chunk of the crud breaks off, it flows downstream and can cork the vessel off completely. This in itself causes poor blood supply to the heart muscle. Cholesterol (among other things) builds up a lining of crud inside the blood vessel, making it’s interior diameter smaller and smaller. The most common cause of a blockage in these coronary arteries is the build-up of atherosclerotic plaque. With very small areas of heart muscle damaged, your heart may keep working, but you have chest pain, nausea and all the rest of the signs of a heart attack. If a big enough area of heart muscle is affected, the heart ceases to function and you die. If one of those arteries gets stopped up, the heart muscle it was taking care of gets really sick, really fast. The coronary arteries are the blood vessels that bring oxygen and nutrition to the heart muscle so that it can do its job. Sometimes people say they’ve "had a coronary". Infarction means that the blood supply to something is stopped up, causing damage to whatever has lost its circulation. Myocardial infarction (M.I.) is the technical term for "heart attack". Dogs (in fact, all domestic animals) very rarely have a heart attack in the sense that we understand it in human medicine. I started to post this under "internal medicine", but it’s in the right place. ![]()
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