 You must be familiar with such Bollywood scenes where an elderly person upon receiving a sad news puts his hand on his chest and collapses to the ground as if struck by a bullet. He is then rushed to the hospital where the doctor announces that it was a heart attack. Well here most of us may find it funny and non-scientific about the relationship between a sad news and a heart attack but let me tell you in reality they do have a relationship and we will talk about it later in the video but before that let us understand what is a heart attack. So we call it a heart attack when the blood flow to a part of the heart muscle is blocked and who supplies blood to the heart muscle? The coronary arteries right? So any blockage in them could cause a heart attack but how is it the sad news that caused a block? Let's find out. To understand it better we have enlarged a part of the coronary artery here and if you could recall from our previous video we discussed about plaque deposition. This is a plaque. These plaques are cholesterol rich fibrous fatty deposit on the membrane of the arteries creating some obstruction to the blood flow and these plaques they grow in size over time. Now when this plaque breaks due to high blood pressure it could block the arteries. Let's see how. So this plaque material can flow downstream with the blood and can block smaller arterioles. On top of that this plaque material they have the tendency to generate blood clots. They can create or generate these blood clots as soon as they come in contact with the blood and apart from that this plaque can create disaster in another way. It can partially detach itself from the arterial wall while parts of it still attach to the artery as you can see and it can flip back and forth in the artery okay like a leaf of a plant and it can block the artery for long enough time to cause a heart attack. How notorious are these plaque you see? And the cardiac muscles which are oxygen deficit now if not treated within 20 minutes of blockage will start to die but this condition is totally reversible if diagnosed early but irreversible damage can be caused if not treated within a maximum of 30 minutes of blockage so time is crucial therefore in medicine they say time is muscle. Now anyone who has a heart attack does not necessarily need to have that classic Bollywood style chest pain and collapsing on the floor kind of heart attack. Most heart attacks have very subtle and only mild discomfort in their chest that intensifies over time. People also feel pain in their arms, abdomens, some in their jaws as well along with shortness of breath and sweating and sometimes it could have no symptom at all. So when you rush such a patient to the hospital what do doctors do first? First of all doctors would test if it is a heart attack or not through an ECG. We have made a video on ECG please check that if you want to know what ECG is. Then when the doctor is confirmed that it's a heart attack he immediately gives him certain medications, medication that could dissolve the plaque, medication that could make the blood very thin with the hope that the blood will flow through the little tiny space that the plaque has left for it but if that doesn't help then the doctor goes for something called the angioplasty where the doctor inserts a thin metal rod which is called a catheter into the artery into the blocked artery that has a deflated balloon kind of thing there and when it reaches the exact position of blockage the doctor inflates the balloon. He deflates it back again and brings the catheter out of the artery and that way the plaque reduces in size with the pressure of the balloon and sometimes the catheter leaves a metal stand inside the artery assuring that the arteries will remain open and the plaque will not regrow in that area and sometimes the alternate option is a bypass surgery for example let's say here is the blockage okay in that case the doctor will extract arteries from other part of the body and will attach it in such a way that the blood could bypass the blockage and still reach the heart muscles so these are the treatment options for a heart attack okay now coming back to our opening scene where a person got a heart attack when he heard a sad news or a shocking news okay now how is that possible if you ask i would tell you that our heartbeat is influenced by our mood because at the time of stress there are a number of neurons that releases neurotransmitters onto the heart that influence the heart rate and not just neurotransmitters there are hormones released by other parts of the body during stress or during an emergency situation that can also influence the heart rate and when the heart rate increases the blood flow the speed of the blood flowing through the arteries also increase that means the blood pressure increases right and we just saw how blood pressure can rupture or uproot a plaque and that can lead to a heart attack now apart from such an unfavorable situation age heredity sex can also play a role in heart attack but we have no control over those right on the other hand the factors upon which we have control and we could change them to avoid a heart attack our tobacco smoking consuming a healthy diet avoiding sedentary lifestyle taking control of diabetes and getting regular health checkups