Cardiology is dealing with diagnosis and nonsurgical therapy of heart defects and coronary artery diseases. The range of these defects and diseases is quite broad and it includes congenital heart and blood vessel abnormalities (in children) and acquired problems, which largely relate to the way of life, unsuitable diet and other factors of civilization. Hypertension and ischaemic heart disease are most frequent cardiovascular diseases with high sickness rate. Unless a suitable treatment is applied, such problems may lead to a number of complications, which have to be prevented by timely diagnostics and appropriate therapeutic procedures, change of diet habits, and exercise.
Other diseases treated by cardiologists include heart rhythm disorders, heart failure, valvular diseases, or blood vessels diseases (tightening, aneurysm).
An important area is also sports cardiology, which focuses on diagnostics of serious heart complications in sportsmen, whose heart is exposed to major workload. So-called sudden cardiac death in sportsmen, which is caused by abnormity of the cardiac muscle – by so called dilated cardiomyopathy, is a feared complication of top-level sportsmen and must be diagnosed soon.
In modern centres in the Czech Republic, teams of cardiologists cooperate with cardio surgeons, who perform surgeries on heart and blood vessels. Surgery treatment is indicated in sudden, life threatening conditions (aneurysm, heart ischaemy, blockages of heart arteries and brain blood vessels), or they are planned in the situations in which there are no options for conservative treatment.