Have you heard the one about how having children runs in families? It’s true . . . if your parents didn’t have kids, most likely you won’t either. OK, bad joke—but it introduces us to the topic of genetics and how it impacts your cardiac health. How close do you have to be to someone genetically for it to affect your likelihood…
Smoking is the most immediately reversible cause of heart disease. It acutely activates platelets, which are cell parts in the bloodstream that help form clots. Within 24 hours of quitting smoking, your blood becomes less “sticky,” lowering the tendency to having a heart attack. By the same token, though, don’t think that “one cigarette won’t hurt me.” That could be the one that triggers…
Diabetes is such a potent risk factor for heart disease that it is often called a heart disease risk equivalent. What is meant by that is that a person with diabetes with no previous history of coronary heart disease has a future risk of a heart attack or other cardiovascular event similar to a person without diabetes who has already…
Let’s return this week to a discussion of cardiac risk factors. I find that my patients get frustrated about the moving target for goals in treating hypercholesterolemia (high cholesterol). When I started my medical training in the 1980s, we generally looked at total cholesterol and considered it to be high if it was over 240. Eventually we learned to look at the different…
I just posted a blog a couple weeks ago about the state of Covid in the new year. Monday I failed to post a blog in a series regarding cardiac risk factors—why? Because I got Covid, just under a year from my bout with it in 2022. I don’t know who I got it from, but it once again occurred when I was…
Happy New Year to everyone. I’ll start out the year with a blog that discusses the most basic of concepts in cardiology: cardiac risk factors. That’s the phrase we use to refer to aspects in a person’s medical history that affect the likelihood of him or her having a heart problem—in particular, the heart problem of coronary heart disease—also known as coronary…
Now that we’ve covered the various types of valvular heart disease, let’s look at it from a different perspective and discuss heart murmurs. Most patients think that a heart murmur and a valve problem are identical, but there are important differences. Understanding this will help you make sense of why you don’t always need to be concerned about a heart…