There are five major risk factors for heart disease, and all but one are at least partially under your control.
- Family History—This risk factor is the only one you can't do anything about. It's not a preview of impending doom, just a caution light on life's highway. If your father had heart problems before age 55 or your mother had problems before age 65, you should ask your doctor for regular tests and be especially careful to minimize other risks.
- Smoking—This is entirely within your control, and heart health is only one of many reasons to quit.
- Cholesterol—Cholesterol abnormalities, meaning both high LDL (bad cholesterol) and low HDL (good cholesterol), in many cases, are in your control through diet and exercise. Often, however, medication may be needed.
- High Blood Pressure—Hypertension (chronic high blood pressure), Steven Ettinger, MD says, is often called "the silent killer" because it's a condition with few or no self-evident symptoms. It's largely controllable through diet and exercise or, as with cholesterol levels, through medication.
- Diabetes—Although diabetes is hereditary in the sense that your genes may put you at risk for it, you may still be able to avoid its onset, or delay the disease for many years. Once again, the keys are exercise, diet, and sometimes prescription drugs. (People with the most serious form of diabetes also need to take insulin.)
As you'd expect, the more of these risk factors you have, the greater the danger.
In fact, many Pennsylvanians are at special risk due to an aging population, eating habits of many people who think a meal isn't complete without lots of meat, and a relatively high incidence of smoking.
George E. Cimochowski, MD, chief of cardiac surgery at the Wyoming Valley Health Care System, Wilkes-Barre, sums up, "You combine smoking with a high-fat diet, and it's an absolute prescription for coronary artery disease."
Many physicians would add stress to the list of risk factors, although it's not quite clear how it figures in. Part of the problem is that it's subjective: what is stressful for one person may not be stressful to another, and vice versa.
Nevertheless, many successful heart therapy programs, particularly after heart surgery, involve relaxation techniques such as meditation and guided imagery.
Gender is another factor. Before menopause, women have fewer heart attacks than men, but after that their risk is the same.
And young women don't get a free pass on the lifestyle issues.
"I operate on many young women. We commonly see diabetic, smoking females under the age of menopause with serious coronary heart disease,” says Dr. Cimochowski.