Cut Your Heart Disease Risk
How to Beat Women's #1 Killer
May 22, 2007
Dr. Janet O'Mahony, MD
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Nowadays there seems to be an awareness-raising walk for almost every illness. The local media do a fine job of promoting Maryland’s annual “Race for the Cure,” in which more than 25,000 people come together to show their support for the battle against breast cancer. Coverage tends to be spottier for the yearly “Heart Walk,” and the turnout is commensurately smaller.
Why? Perhaps breast cancer seems more personal than heart disease. But is anything more personal than your own mortality? Women must understand that it is heart disease that is the nation’s — and women’s — No. l killer, claiming more lives than the next four leading causes of death combined (cancer, lung disease, accidents and diabetes). Nearly 40 percent of ALL deaths are heart related! For women, this means that while 1 in 30 deaths are from breast cancer, a staggering 1 in 2.6 deaths are from cardiovascular disease. More than ten times as many women die of heart disease each year than from breast cancer.
How do you know if you are at risk for heart disease? The heart is affected by several risk factors, including diabetes, family health history, age, hypertension, high cholesterol, smoking, obesity and lack of exercise. The more risk factors you have, the greater your chances of having a heart attack. Gender plays a role, too: Women are usually older than men when they develop heart disease. The average male heart attack victim is 65; the average female victim is 70. So, to look on the bright side, women have a few more years in which to develop a healthy lifestyle!
Consider the dangers of arteriosclerosis. Cholesterol and calcium plaques can line the arteries, breaking off to form a clot that can stop blood flow to critical heart muscle, causing a heart attack. This could kill you right away or could damage the heart muscle so it no longer pumps properly. This same process can occur in other parts of the body and can lead to stroke in the brain, poor circulation of the legs, and failure of the kidneys.
Diabetes mellitus, particularly when a person is overweight, is a strong risk factor for heart disease. If you have diabetes, minding your diet and exercise and keeping your sugars under control are vital steps. (I would prefer that everyone exercise and eat a healthy diet — because fewer people would ever become diabetic.)
Hypertension, or high blood pressure, causes stress on the arteries and can strain the heart. Reducing your blood pressure can lower your risk of heart disease. Unfortunately, hypertension typically has no symptoms, which is why it is called “the silent killer.” Get your blood pressure checked!
Smoking, of course, can lead to cancer and lung disease, but it is also the most important risk factor for heart disease. Smokers have double the risk! Do you need any other reason to quit? Former smokers cut their heart disease risk in half after only one year. How about this? Smokers’ life expectancy on average is 13 years less than nonsmokers’.
Cholesterol comes in several varieties. HDL, or good cholesterol, can help lower your risk of heart disease, but high levels of LDL, or bad cholesterol, can increase your chances of having a heart attack. Treating cholesterol with medication in people with other risk factors for heart disease has been shown to reduce heart attacks (and other bad events) by at least a third. If you have diabetes, you definitely should take cholesterol medication no matter how good your cholesterol.
It is scary to admit, but you share a lot of genes with your siblings. Family history is extremely helpful in determining your risk. Close relatives are usually more important than distant cousins and uncles, but generally having a male relative with heart attack before age 55 or a female relative with heart attack before 65 is a warning sign for early heart disease. You can’t pick your relations, but you can use your family information to gauge your own risk.
Obesity and lack of exercise are risk factors, too, but this may be because they increase the likelihood of diabetes, high cholesterol and hypertension. Having a waist circumference greater than 40 inches in men and 35 inches in women is particularly risky because this indicates high body fat. (Put the tape measure around the largest part of your belly, not where your jeans are sitting.) Did you know that 65 percent of us are now considered overweight? The best exercise might be pushing yourself away from the table.
While addressing all these risk factors may seem daunting, medical science continues to make strides and offer new forms of treatment. Aspirin has been shown to reduce heart attack and stroke in patients with risk factors, and cholesterol medication is also very effective. But the main job is up to you: You are going to have to quit smoking, get moving and quit overeating if you want to prevent that heart attack. Start today and enjoy many more tomorrows!
Dr. Janet O’Mahony is a physician specializing in internal medicine at Mercy Medical Center. She can be reached at 410-951-7920.
