Sunday, March 11, 2012

How to Prevent Heart Disease?

Can heart disease be prevented, if so how to prevent it? As well we know that it is one of popular causes of death in this modern living. It is divided into several types, and each type has different symptoms. But chest pain (more typically in men) and shortness of breath are the common symptoms of all types of heart disease.

One of great ideas to prevent heart disease is by clearly knowing and controlling the controllable risk factors for heart disease, which may include smoking, having high levels of blood pressure & LDL (bad cholesterol), being physically inactive, and so on.

Can a regular exercise prevent heart disease?

Lack of exercise is one of risk factors of heart disease. There are also many studies that found a regular exercise can give a significant positive effect to control the levels of cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, blood sugar (particularly if you have type 1 or type 2 diabetes), and even also can be helpful for therapy to quit smoking if you are a smoker!

Furthermore, there are a lot of health advantages that we can get by having a regular exercise. In fact, people with a regular exercise are more likely healthier than people with lack of exercise. Therefore, many experts believe that a regular exercise can be so helpful to lower your likelihood of a heart attack.

Pregnancy complications

If you are a woman, it’s important to know that the complications of pregnancy can put you at future risk of developing heart disease! But these complications can be an opportunity to early detect that there is something wrong with your heart.

Talk with your primary-care doctor about your pregnancy complications, and then your doctor can evaluate cardiac risk of your body to get quickly the right prevention strategies.

In many cases, women who have gestational diabetes in their pregnancy will get higher likelihood of diabetes (particularly type 2 diabetes). And after you get diabetes, then your risk to get heart disease is higher.

So, if you have gestational diabetes during pregnancy (it usually occurs in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy), talk with your doctor about what you can do to prevent diabetes and heart disease! Doctor usually recommends changing your bad lifestyles, which may include diabetes diet program and aggressive lifestyle changes, or other possible medications.

If you have diabetes, follow ‘ABCs Guide’!

What is ABCs? It consists of:
  1. ‘A’ means ‘A1c’! It is a rough assessment of blood test to monitor the levels of blood sugar for the previous 3 months. In people with diabetes, the ideal level of A1c should be less than 7!
  2. ‘B’ means about ‘Blood pressure’! The ideal safely range of blood pressure for people with diabetes is 80-130.
  3. ‘C’ means ‘Cholesterol’, particularly for LDL (bad cholesterol) and HDL (good cholesterol). In individuals with diabetes, the ideal levels of LDL are less than 100, and for the ideal levels of HDL are higher than 40.
In addition, if you have diabetes and you smoke, you have to stop smoking as earlier as possible!

What else you can do to prevent heart disease?
  1. Eat healthy foods, particularly such as fresh fruits and vegetables. Either vegetables or fruits can be helpful to protect your body from harmful inflammation (it is one of major issues that can increase your likelihood of insulin resistance, heart disease, and cancer).
  2. Keep your ideal weight, because overweight can increase your likelihood of diabetes and heart disease.
  3. If you want to drink alcohol, you should drink it in moderation or avoid drinking it if necessary for better result!
  4. Manage your stress as well! Don’t allow your stress control you, but you have to be able to control your stress!
  5. And don’t forget to talk with your doctor to get more advices about how to prevent heart disease!
-- Image credit to ‘Getty Images’ for illustration