Know your risk: How can heart disease be prevented?

Know your risk: How can heart disease be prevented?

The best treatment for heart disease is to prevent it! Heart disease is the most common cause of death worldwide. The good news is that it is preventable for the most part. Having awareness of the risk factors, especially the ones you can modify, is the single most important point in this blog. These include family history, stress, tobacco and drug use, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, obesity, and diabetes.

There are many cardiac risk factor calculators online. These calculators assume that you have not had a prior heart attack or stroke. If you have, you really don’t need to calculate your risk, because you are already at high risk, you have already had the disease. To be honest with you, as a cardiologist, I do not usually use these calculators frequently, because I see more patients with disease than were risk. In addition, if you have 2 or more of the risk factors that we have discussed, you are not at low risk. The one that I like to use is the ACC/AHA Assessment of Cardiovascular Risk (ASCVD) Calculator, which calculates your 10-year risk of heart disease or stroke Risk. www.cvriskcalculator.com.

This calculator helps forecast the potential impact of different interventions on your risk, and also helps reassess risk at follow-up visits. It takes the following factors into account: age, gender, race, total cholesterol, and your blood pressure. It also asks about if the patient is on blood pressure treatment, if they are diabetic, and if they smoke. The higher the score, the higher is the percentage of developing heart disease. Changing these risks, such as stopping exercise, weight loss, eating healthier, and exercise help decrease your risk.

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