{"id":17549,"date":"2013-10-01T17:48:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-01T22:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/?p=17549"},"modified":"2025-02-28T19:37:16","modified_gmt":"2025-03-01T00:37:16","slug":"valve-disease-progression-stress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/2013\/10\/01\/valve-disease-progression-stress\/","title":{"rendered":"“Can a Physically Demanding Job Cause an Early Onset of Heart Valve Disease?” Asks Jerry"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just received an interesting question from Jerry. In his email, Jerry writes, “Adam, I’m 53 and a recent mitral valve repair<\/a> and aortic valve replacement<\/a> patient. My question is… Can a physically demanding profession – like wildland firefighting — contribute to, cause an early onset, or accelerate the development of valve disease in a previously healthy person?”<\/p>\n

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\"Wildland<\/p>\n

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To help Jerry better understand the progression of valvular disease, I contacted Dr. Luis Castro<\/a>, a leading heart surgeon at MarinHealth Heart and Vascular Institute in Marin County, California. Doctor Castro offered several interesting thoughts for Jerry that I decided to share with our community. Here is Dr. Castro’s response:<\/p>\n

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Jerry, that is a fantastic question!\u00a0 Although the direct relationship between stress and cardiovascular disease is still under scientific scrutiny and investigation, we can all agree that stress appears to be playing a major role in modulating blood pressure and influencing basic \u201cwear and tear\u201d on the human body.\u00a0 The human heart is a mechanical pump, with moveable parts, and because of that, is prone to injury as well.\u00a0 The fact that most of us escape this planet without valvular heart problems is a miracle in and of itself!\u00a0 Consider the amazing design and beautifully functional structure of your heart valve leaflets.\u00a0 They open and close with every beat of your heart, approximately 80- 100,000 times per day\u2026\u00a0 that is at least 1.5 billion times by the age of 50!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\"\"Dr. Luis Castro<\/p>\n

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Dr. Castro then touched on the potential impact of blood pressure and physical stress specific to the functioning of our valves.<\/p>\n

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Blood pressure, or stress, can be simply compared to the engine idle of your car.\u00a0 Not much wear is being demanded at rest — when the engine is idling at less than 1000rpm.\u00a0 Now imagine your car in neutral with the gas pedal slightly depressed and idling at 3000rpm\u2026 the engine is working harder, and it is just sitting still at 0 miles per hour. Now, add a slightly malformed valve at birth, or acquired injury by infection, etc., and you add on top of this, increased vulnerability to wear and tear by additional stresses inflicted by blood pressure and other modulators\u2026\u00a0\u00a0It is certainly within reason to believe that added stress can contribute to early valve deterioration.\u00a0\u00a0 We are all deeply grateful to fire fighters and alike who risk their lives on the job as part of a “routine” days work.\u00a0 I hope that this helps.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Luis Castro, MD<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thanks to Jerry for his question and a special thanks to Dr. Castro<\/a> for sharing his clinical experience and research with our patient community.<\/p>\n

Keep on tickin!
\nAdam<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25338,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-patient-stories"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17549"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40224,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17549\/revisions\/40224"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}