The Heart – Maria Conley, M.D.

A board certified internal medicine physician talks about how your heart pump can fail to deliver enough oxygen to the rest of your body. Your body tries to compensate by activating the sympathetic nervous system and the RAS (renin angiotensin system) proteins. These efforts may work at first but can lead to fluid retention and trouble breathing over time. The medications that can restore your heart’s pumping function block the actions of one or both of these compensatory systems.

A board certified internal medicine physician explains how plaque forms in your arteries and causes disease. We see how your low density lipoprotein (LDL) level can be a useful lab value to reveal your overall risk for having a heart attack or stroke. For more info on what LDL actually is, please watch my previous video on apoB lipoproteins.

A board certified internal medicine physician talks about why you should care about the level of apoB lipoproteins (fat transporters) in your blood. We follow the life cycle of an apoB fat transporter as it emerges from your liver as a VLDL (very low density lipoprotein), morphs into an IDL (intermediate density lipoprotein) and finally ends up as a cholesterol-rich LDL (low density lipoprotein). We see how all of these tiny lipoproteins can invade the walls of your arteries and cause disease.

A board certified internal medicine physician explains how to lower your risk of heart attack and stroke by comparing your arteries to a system of human fuel pipelines in need of constant maintenance.