How Hypothyroidism Causes Heart Attack

Many previous studies have found a relationship between hypothyroidism and heart failure and/or heart attack.

But how does hypothyroidism cause heart attack? And what can you do to prevent it? This has been a mystery until now.

Because a new study in the Journal PLOS ONE reveals why this happens—and how to prevent it.

Heart rate variability refers to your heart’s ability to adapt to external stimuli. When you are asleep, for example, your heart is meant to beat slowly, whereas it speeds up significantly when you run away from a robber who has just woken you up.

In this way, your heart varies its rate throughout the day. But if it cannot do this effectively, it might fail at a crucial moment when you need it to adapt.

A team of researchers performed a review of the already published literature on the relationship between hypothyroidism and heart rate variability.

After searching through medical databases, they found 17 studies with 11,438 subjects. They excluded studies on animals, studies on children, non-peer reviewed studies and studies with weak scientific controls.

They discovered exactly what they expected. People with hypothyroidism had much worse heart rate variability than those had whose thyroid hormones were at normal levels.

In fact, the heart rate variability of hypothyroid patients was clearly shown to be weaker on all seven of the heart scan parameters they used to measure heart rate variability, which is a pretty emphatic result.

They also found that, as the severity of hypothyroidism increased in the subjects, heart rate variability decreased even further.

So, why exactly does this happen?

It has everything to do with your autonomic nervous system.

Your autonomic nervous system consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions. These two divisions control the same involuntary body functions (like heart rate and digestion), but in opposite directions.

The sympathetic division is activated when a “fight-or-flight” response is needed. It prepares your body for strenuous physical activity.

The parasympathetic system calms everything down once the threat is over and restores your body back to rest.

In hypothyroidism patients, there is an increase in sympathetic activity and a decrease in parasympathetic activity. This means that your muscles are chronically contracted for physical activity while your vagus nerve, one of the largest nerves in your body and an essential part of your parasympathetic system, is suppressed.

The researchers believed this to be a direct consequence of the increase in thyroid-stimulating hormone, the hormone produced in larger amounts when your body detects that your thyroid hormone levels are low.

If your heart is permanently prepared for fight-and-flight and never rests, as these findings indicate, you will have reduced heart rate variability and, thus, be at risk of heart attack or heart failure.

The only way to prevent this from happening is to heal your hypothyroidism. Fortunately, this is not hard to do. Thousands of readers have healed their hypothyroidism using the simple natural steps explained here…

And if your cholesterol is out of control, you’ll be happy to hear you can normalize it and clear out clogged arteries by cutting out this one ingredient you didn’t even know you were consuming…