Don’t underestimate heart disease—learn how to protect yourself and start today
Fact: Cardiovascular disease kills more women over 25 than all cancers combined.
Fact: Young women who have heart attacks are twice as likely to die from them as men are.
Fact: You can protect yourself—and you should start right now.
If all this has your heart beating a little faster, well, a little worry might not be such a bad thing—assuming it makes you start taking steps to prevent heart disease. And you can do just that, since many heart attacks in women are caused by factors like hypertension and high cholesterol that could have been treated or prevented altogether.
“It’s important to take care of your heart even before you have any symptoms,” says Arthur Agatston, M.D., a Miami cardiologist and author of the new book The South Beach Heart Program. “Quite simply, the earlier you start, the easier it is to prevent heart disease.”
Find Your Fruit.
Carrying extra weight around can be dangerous, especially if those excess pounds find their way to your belly and not, say, your hips. Recent studies indicate that abdominal fat is metabolically different from the other fat in your body: As you gain padding around your middle, the individual cells swell, and their size is linked to higher triglyceride levels and lower good cholesterol.
The best treatment for belly fat? A mix of diet and exercise. Working out regularly also has a ripple effect on the body: Not only do dangerous pounds come off, but your muscles become more efficient at using blood; your heart gets stronger; and your blood vessels become more limber, so blood flows more easily. “A lot of things don’t make you feel better in the short term,” Dr. Hayes says. “Exercise is the one thing that does.”
Whether walking, running, or swimming, you should aim to work your heart to about 50 to 70 percent of its maximum rate. Even this amount of exercise is powerful enough to combat other high-risk factors: A study out of the Cooper Institute in Dallas found that even moderately fit people had half the death rates of those who were sedentary.
Do some drugs.
If blood tests show your cholesterol is high, a change in diet and exercise might help. But in many cases, it’s too late or your numbers are too high for these basic steps to help. That’s when your doctor may give you a cholesterol-lowering medication, known as a statin, which keeps the liver from producing too much cholesterol.
Some doctors have questioned the wisdom of prescribing these drugs, especially for patients who might lower their cholesterol through lifestyle changes. But recent studies show that statins can diminish LDL by as much as 40 percent, slightly raise the level of HDL, and reduce the risk of heart attacks by about 35 percent.
This is why many experts say these medications are actually underprescribed. “Statins are incredible tools in lowering cholesterol and can keep many people from suffering heart attacks,” Dr. Agatston says. “But there’s no question: They’re meant to work together with proper diet and exercise.” Women taking statins may experience muscle fatigue as a side effect, though, and should get regular blood tests to check liver function.
Get prenatal care.
Around 135,000 women every year get gestational diabetes, high blood sugar that’s likely a result of pregnancy hormones blocking adequate insulin production.
Doctors used to think it came and went with pregnancy. But research now shows that gestational diabetes gives you a 50 percent chance of developing diabetes later in life, which in turn makes you three to seven times more prone to heart disease.
That puts you in line with the 54 million other Americans who have prediabetes. Diabetes, especially type 2, is often attributed to obesity, though many cases result from genetics and/or environment. Cardiologists consider diabetics heart patients as well: Even if they’ve never had an attack, they tend to have high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
“Having diabetes is equivalent to having heart disease,” says Paula Johnson, M.D., chief of the division of women’s health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She treats diabetics and heart patients with the same regimen of aspirin and statins.
“The best thing is to protect yourself with diet, weight control, and exercise so you never develop diabetes, even if you had it when pregnant.”
Understand how women differ from men.
While some women do experience chest-clutching pain, many others have subtler symptoms. In fact, a recent survey of women recovering from heart attacks found that many had worsening symptoms for weeks leading up to an episode but mistook them for indigestion, fatigue, or muscle strain.
Nieca Goldberg, M.D., a New York City cardiologist and author of The Women’s Healthy Heart Program, says two-thirds of women who die of heart attacks never even make it to the hospital — by the time they recognize what’s happening, it’s already too late.
Symptoms aren’t the only way men and women differ when it comes to heart problems. Only in the last decade have scientists started to explore how heart disease manifests in each sex, and they still don’t have a lot of answers. They do know that it’s about more than the size of our hearts.
Research from the National Institutes of Health shows that doctors may have missed heart disease in some 3 million women who have diffuse plaque, where plaque spreads evenly through the arteries instead of building up to create major blockage. On angiograms (x-rays of the blood vessels) these arteries look clear.
The NIH research also looked at women with microvascular disease, in which small vessels don’t dilate properly during exertion. Their angiograms were often clear too. While they’re not headed for immediate heart attack, women with diffuse plaque and microvascular disease do need to be treated with either lifestyle changes or medication or both. “Doctors should diagnose intuitively,” Dr. Johnson says. “If a woman comes in with symptoms” — shortness of breath, positive cardiac stress test, high cholesterol — “we can assume she needs to be treated even if her angiogram is clear. We can’t just send her home and do nothing.”
The lesson? You may need to be your own strongest advocate where your heart’s concerned.
Source: http://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/heart-disease-facts-3