It’s World Heart Day (actually it was yesterday where I am, but with time zones, most of the English-speaking world is still on the 28th of September as I type).
Do you know your heart risk? Risk factors for heart disease include:
- Being significantly overweight
- Smoking
- Eating a diet high in fat and saturated fat, and low in fruits and vegetables
- A sedentary lifestyle
- Depression, isolation and lack of social support
- A family history of heart disease
Apart from the last one, you can do something about all of these. Positive lifestyle change is the most powerful health intervention you can take to extend your life and improve its quality.
Here are some tools to assess your risk:
- From the American Heart Association (you’ll need to know your blood pressure and cholesterol levels).
- A quicker, simpler version at Boston Scientific, which also asks about exercise.
- A calculator at PreventDisease based on the enormous Framingham study gives you a percentage risk of heart disease in the next 10 years.
- The Better Health Channel has a similar quiz with popups explaining each risk factor. More focussed on lifestyle, so you won’t need to know your cholesterol or blood pressure.
Take a few minutes now to check one or more of these calculators and, if they report that you’re at risk, give your doctor a call for a more thorough assessment.
None of those tools look at psychosocial elements like depression and isolation, which are harder to assess in a quick quiz, but those factors do play an important role in heart risk. Interestingly, this position paper from the Medical Journal of Australia states that work or life stress is not supported by the weight of current evidence as a direct risk factor for heart disease (though it can trigger cardiac events). However, stress probably is an indirect risk factor in that it makes other risk factors (like smoking and poor nutrition) more likely. And there is strong evidence that depression, social isolation and lack of social support are associated with increased heart disease risk, so if you suffer from one or more of these factors, have your heart checked.
I blog extensively here on lifestyle, personal change, nutrition, exercise and smoking, and I’ll be discussing psychosocial factors increasingly in the future. If these are topics that interest you, please subscribe.
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