What is the most important thing women can do to protect their hearts?
The most important thing is exercise. Exercise can decrease your risk for breast cancer, treat depression, prevent heart attacks and strokes, control blood pressure, prevent adult-onset diabetes. The other important thing is having the same due diligence that women have for seeing their ob-gyn to seeing a cardiologist to determine their risk. Q: What are the risk factors for women? A: Smoking brings on heart disease, 10 to 20 years earlier. Strong family history of heart disease is a risk factor. Post-menopausal for women is a strong risk factor. Diabetes. High blood pressure. High cholesterol. The risk factors are basically the same for men. Q: Who needs cholesterol-lowering medication? A: There was an interesting study done in 2007 where they used criteria to determine if someone was low risk, intermediate risk or high risk for heart disease. Then they looked at patients who had reported a heart attack or stroke. The scariest part of the study was that 80 percent of the people, befor
