Digital Pulsewave Analysis
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) refers to diseases of the heart (cardio) and diseases of the blood vessels (vascular) and includes angina, heart attack, congestive heart failure, stroke, peripheral vascular disease, chronic kidney disease, retinopathy, arteriosclerosis, atherosclerosis, and sexual dysfunction.
Cardiovascular disease is the major cause of death in the United States; it claims more lives than all other diseases combined. Risk factors for CVD include hypertension, diabetes, cigarette smoking, obesity, physical inactivity, dyslipidemia, poor kidney function, family history, ethnicity, and age.
Poor endothelial function appears to be at the center of cardiovascular health. The endothelium is the layer of thin, flat cells that lines the interior surface of blood vessels. Endothelial cells are involved in many aspects of vascular biology, including vasoconstriction & vasodilation (blood pressure), blood clotting (thrombosis & fibrinolysis), atherosclerosis (thickening of arterial walls), formation of new blood vessels (angiogenesis), and inflammation and swelling (edema).
When the endothelium becomes damaged, blood vessels lose elasticity, arterial walls thicken, and plaque formation (arteriosclerosis) begins. Arteriosclerosis can remain undetected for many years. In fact nearly half of all people in the western world who die from cardiovascular related illnesses never experience any prior symptoms.
Therefore, it is imperative to determine the health of your arteries so that you can learn how to take appropriate measures before clinical disease sets in. Studies strongly suggest that those people who repair and maintain a healthy endothelium, get exercise, good nutrition, and nutraceutical therapies can slow the aging of arteries and thus delay or prevent altogether the onset of cardiovascular disease.
The question is, how do we measure the health of the endothelium? The Digital Pulsewave Analyzer (DPA), an FDA Class 2 screening device, tests overall cardiovascular health providing information on arterial wall stiffness and determines the biological age of arteries in less than three minutes. As the heart beats, pressure and flow pulse waves travel away from the heart and are reflected back toward the heart from various locations in the arterial system. The DPA uses a painless finger probe to observe the changes in pressure, blood flow, velocity and profile throughout the whole pulse wave. With one out of every two people dying of cardiovascular disease in the United States, you can become proactive against the number one killer by choosing this non-invasive cardiovascular assessment.