Heart Problem: Why Cocaine Causes Heart Problems

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Why Cocaine Causes Heart Problems
There are many reasons that cocaine causes heart problems. First of all, it causes your heart to race, which can damage its muscles. But it also causes damage to your arteries and veins, often to the smallest veins around your heart. It can cause them to constrict and even cause irregular or uneven blood flow.

Even worse, it can cause stiffness in these blood-carrying vessels that can stimulate the stiffness caused by a high cholesterol and high fat diet. Though this stiffness is often temporary, it can be severe enough to trigger a variety of serious and even deadly heart problems. And these problems may occur even if you rarely, if ever, …show more content…

A study performed by Dr. Varun Kamar at Mount Sinai Hospital decided to check the smallest vessels in the bodies of two groups of people who came there with chest pain: those who did cocaine and those who did not.

The results were clear: the small vessels were heavily impacted by cocaine use. They were over-dilated, which caused blood flow that was too quick and which could easily lead to problems like pain in the chest and even a heart attack. The major problem is that this damage is not easily detected or checked for in most incidents of chest pain: only the larger arteries.

Often, this results in people being released from treatment because doctors couldn 't find any problems in the most obvious areas. So users continue to put their lives at risk by using cocaine and damaging these small blood vessels. Sadly, this only increases their risk of developing a variety of heart concerns.

Cocaine Will Raise Your Blood Pressure
The stimulating effect of cocaine will immediately increase your blood pressure to dangerous levels through the previously mentioned over-dilation. Though this increased blood pressure will only be temporary, it can still lead to a variety of concerns including, but not limited

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