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Cardiovascular disease: Understanding the leading killer
You've seen the stories time and again: Exercise to prevent coronary artery disease. Eat better to reduce your risk of coronary heart disease. Stop smoking to stop heart disease. Lower your cholesterol to lower your odds of developing cardiovascular disease. Coronary artery disease? Coronary heart disease? Heart disease? Cardiovascular disease? What are all these things? And what's the difference, anyway? Perhaps you've been bombarded so often with warnings and advice about your heart that you simply don't pay attention anymore. Or you don't know what these conditions mean or exactly how destructive they can be to your health. Understanding the various terms and how they're often used — sometimes incorrectly — can help you sort through the morass. And if you know more about the various types of cardiovascular disease, and the havoc they can wreak on your body, you may be more inclined to take steps to prevent them. You'll also know more about the ways all of the different manifestations of cardiovascular disease interact to affect your health, and you'll learn how you can best control your risks.
Defining cardiovascular diseaseFirst, consider cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease is a broad, all-encompassing term. It's not a single condition or disorder in itself. Rather, it's a collection of diseases and conditions. In fact, some types of cardiovascular disease can even cause other types of cardiovascular disease. To get technical, cardiovascular disease refers to any disorder in any of the various parts of your cardiovascular system, which is made up of your heart and the blood vessels throughout your body. Cardiovascular disease, then, has two main components:
Although you may hear a lot about preventing cardiovascular disease, sometimes you can't prevent it. That's because some types of cardiovascular disease are congenital — you're born with them. Other forms are acquired — you develop them over the course of your lifetime. These acquired conditions are the forms you can often help prevent by doing such things as exercising regularly, eating a balanced diet or quitting smoking. And they make up the vast majority of cardiovascular diseases. So, if you have something wrong with your heart, such as an abnormality of the heart muscle (cardiomyopathy), that's a type of cardiovascular disease. Likewise, an aneurysm, a bulging section of blood vessel, also is a type of cardiovascular disease. And even varicose veins are technically classified as a cardiovascular disease.
International AIDS Candlelight Memorial
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Diseases of the heart (cardio) 
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