Former Rare Staff
Drug abuse can cause irreparable harm to the human body, but sometimes it’s hard to understand the extent of that damage since there’s no way for us to see what’s going on underneath the surface of our skin.
Videos by Rare
A recent video uploaded to Instagram by Medspiration shows the effect cocaine has on the heart after excessive drug use. In the graphic video, a heart swollen to three times its normal size after it was removed from a patient who used cocaine for 15 years.
“First of all, make no mistake, this heart is not beating in a coordinated fashion. It wouldn’t support life,” Dr Klaus Witte, a consultant cardiologist at Leeds General Infirmary, told the MailOnline. “This heart, it’s not beating. Those are not normal contractions. It’s twitching in a desperate way.”
According to WedMD, Cocaine is responsible for more emergency room visits than any other illegal drug and can have a horribly detrimental effect on the heart. As stated on their site, “Cocaine is bad for the heart. Cocaine increases heart rate and blood pressure while constricting the arteries supplying blood to the heart. The result interrupts blood flow to the heart muscle itself, which can cause a heart attack, even in young people without heart disease. Cocaine can also trigger potentially deadly abnormal heart rhythms (called arrhythmias)..”
If this Medspiration video is any indication, we’d say that, yes, cocaine is clearly very bad for the heart.
This post was originally published on August 27, 2016.
