Your heart is the center of everything connected to your body. So it makes sense to take care of your heart in big and small ways. Women are not excluded from heart disease. Theresa Brennan, MD, cardiologist at UI Heart and Vascular Center, talks about preventing heart disease in women:
At what age should women be concerned about heart disease?
Women tend to get heart disease later in life, so most women think they don’t need to worry about heart disease until they get into their 50s and 60s. But the reality is that we should all think about heart disease when we’re younger—even in our 20s—so that we can develop a good heart-healthy lifestyle and prevent heart disease as long as possible.
What simple lifestyle changes can a woman make to decrease her risk of developing heart disease?
That’s a good question. The most simple and straightforward is that a woman should see her doctor on a regular basis. The American Heart Association recommends that we know our numbers:
- Body mass index
- Cholesterol
- Blood sugar
- Blood pressure
We can look at those numbers and see if they’re optimal and if they need any work.
The second is to have a good heart-healthy lifestyle. That means exercising on a regular basis and having a very heart-healthy diet, including lots of fruits and vegetables, lots of fiber, and low fat. Diabetes tends to be a very, very impressive risk factor for women—probably more so than with men—so anything we can do to prevent diabetes is very important. That includes a good heart-healthy lifestyle with exercise and good diet and maintaining an ideal body weight.
The last thing that’s not so simple, but clearly very important—no man or woman should smoke because it has a great impact on the development of heart disease.
If heart disease is genetic or the woman has a family history, can she really prevent developing heart disease?
Yes. While family history is a very powerful risk factor, and obviously we can’t change our genetics, we can recognize that family history does put us at higher risk and we can use that information to try to postpone the development of heart disease. Maybe even prevent the significant development of heart disease in the future by taking care of those risk factors that we talked about.
I am going to list some common things women may not think will affect their heart—can you tell us why these may help prevent heart disease:
Eating well
Eating well can do a number of things. Eating well has an impact on your cholesterol, and clearly we know that high cholesterol puts people at increased risk of heart disease. But also, eating well can help to control diabetes, can help to control high blood pressure, and can help to control obesity—all of which are major risk factors for heart disease.
Taking a daily vitamin or mineral supplement
The best thing to do with regard to supplementation is to have a good diet and we should achieve our dietary recommended intake of daily vitamins and supplements. Beyond that, vitamins don’t have a great impact, with a couple of exceptions. Omega -3 fatty acids are an exception to supplementation. The Heart Association recommends we have a significant intake of fish in our diet, and if you’re not able to achieve that, supplementing with omega-3 fatty acids. More recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about vitamin D and the risk of heart disease in people that have low vitamin D. It’s not been proven yet that supplementing with vitamin D decreases that risk, but maintaining a healthy intake of vitamin D is important.
Exercising
Exercising is clearly important. It gives your heart a workout and lets us know if you have symptoms. If you don’t exercise, many times symptoms will be missed because you’re not working your heart enough. It’s recommended that we all exercise at least five days a week, at least for 30 minutes at a time. And this doesn’t need to be aggressive running and jogging. Walking is a great exercise and actually reduces the risk of heart disease significantly.
Reducing stress
There’s no great data that says that stress has a direct impact on cardiovascular events, on heart attacks, and strokes. But clearly, stress has an impact on our overall health and does lend to increased heart rate and increased blood pressure at the time of the stressful event, and does increase risk factors. When you’re stressed, you tend to eat more, smoke more, sleep less well, and not exercise as well. And some people with significant stress in their life may develop depression, and we know that in people who have heart disease depression can worsen their prognosis.
Introducing or increasing things like meditation, massage, and yoga
Learning to deal with stress is probably the most important aspect of stress management. Meditation, massage, and yoga may have an impact on a person’s ability to deal with those, but being able to deal with stress in your daily life may have an impact on that stress and then on those risks that we talked about.
Do women experience different heart attack symptoms than men?
They do, and that’s one of the big problems with heart disease in women, it’s under recognized in woman and sometimes in their physicians. The most common symptom or a heart attack or of heart disease is chest pain. Women certainly do have chest pain, but they are more likely to have other symptoms like having pain in their arm, or their jaw, or their back. Having single symptoms like nausea or breathing troubles wouldn’t be recognized necessarily as their heart if they weren’t thinking about it.
If symptoms are not long-lasting but reoccurring—when should she seek medical care?
Symptoms that are unusual and don’t have a reason, particularly in a woman who has risk factors for heart disease—particularly those symptoms that we just talked about—should make a woman think about going to their doctor. Clearly if symptoms occur in the middle of the night or if they’re long-lasting (more than 15 minutes), at that point, a woman—if they have symptoms that could be consistent with heart disease—should probably call 9-1-1- and get to the emergency room. |
