A patient is experiencing increased afterload. How would this condition likely impact the heart structure over time?

A. Cerebrospinal fluid leakage is important to note but not the immediate priority.
B. Assessing for neck injury is crucial but airway management takes precedence to prevent life-threatening hypoxia.
C. Ensuring airway patency is the highest priority in trauma care to maintain oxygenation and ventilation, which are vital for survival.
D. Neurological assessment with the Glasgow Coma Scale is important but comes after securing airway, breathing, and circulation.

A. It enlarges the heart chambers – This is typically seen with volume overload, not pressure overload. Volume overload leads to chamber dilation, not wall thickening.
B. It strengthens heart valves – Afterload does not improve valve function; in fact, high afterload can worsen conditions like aortic stenosis over time.
C. It thickens heart walls – The heart compensates for increased afterload (e.g., from chronic hypertension or aortic stenosis) by hypertrophying (thickening) the ventricular walls. This is called concentric hypertrophy, a structural adaptation to increased pressure.
D. It thins the heart walls – Thinning occurs in conditions like dilated cardiomyopathy where the problem is decreased contractility and volume overload, not increased afterload.