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- When you think about it
in a very simple fashion,
the heart is a muscle
and its main job is to pump blood.
But certain things can cause it to fail.
There's genetic reasons,
there's reasons related to valve disease,
there's myocarditis
where you get a viral infection that affects the heart.
It's a final common pathway that can result
from many, many different things.
The most common cause is a heart attack.
You get fatty plaque buildup inside the blood vessel
that actually supplies the heart itself,
and unless that blood vessel is opened up immediately,
that muscle will die.
The rest of the muscle that's left,
that's not dead anymore,
has to do extra to keep up with what's been lost.
And overtime it can't keep up
and that's when the heart starts to fail
and heart failure develops.