Cardiomegaly is the word that doctors use to describe when they have found that patient’s heart is enlarged.
When a doctor discovers that a patient has cardiomegaly, that patient is going to have one of the three different types of cardiomegaly.
Dilated
The first type of cardiomegaly happens when the heart muscle weakens and the chambers of the enlarged heart, or dilate. Even though the enlargement of the heart’s chambers is something that is a key aspect of dilated cardiomegaly, this isn’t the main problem.
With this type of cardiomegaly, it affects all of the parts of a person’s myocardium. This type of cardiomegaly will cause the patient to go into heart failure.
Hypertrophic
The second type of cardiomegaly is known as hypertrophic cardiomegaly. This happens when there is an overgrowth of heart muscle and it can make the blood flow in and out of a person’s heart difficult.
People who have this disease have a strange growth of the fibers of their heart muscle and this makes the chambers of their heart bulky and the walls to be very thick.
A lot of times it’s the septum of the heart, which is what is between the left and right ventricles, which is enlarged so that both sides of it aren’t even.
Even though the left ventricle may be contracting, a lot of times the patient’s brain and other important organs aren’t getting the amount of blood they need because the blood is trapped in the heart when the contractions are happening.
Restrictive
The last type of cardiomegaly is known as restrictive and it’s the least common type. It usually happens when the heart is infiltrated with stuff that isn’t normal, or with any of the other types of fibrosing processes which are chronic.
When this happens, the patient’s heart isn’t able to expand enough so that it is able to fill with blood and it also can’t contract enough so that the lungs are able to get enough blood to oxygenate and the other tissues don’t get the normal amount of blood that they are used to.
Cardiomegaly is something that a doctor, usually a cardiologist, will discover through testing(Electrocardiogram).
Once cardiomegaly is diagnosed, the doctor will sit down with the patient and discuss what the course of treatment is going to be and what the patient will need to do to help their condition and expand their life.
