Heart Disease

What You Can Do to Prevent Heart Disease 

  • Identify a primary care physician. See your primary care physician once a year to have your heart checked. If you get checked regularly and a serious problem occurs, your doctor is likely to catch the problem early when it responds best to treatment.  
  • Educate yourself and others about heart disease. It is important to understand what heart disease is, what your personal risks are, and how your lifestyle and family history may affect you and your loved ones.
  •  Commit to be active. Exercise is essential to maintaining a healthy heart. Start an exercise program, and get moving. Any change whether big or small is a postive step towards a healthy heart. 
  • Adopt a heart-healthy diet. Avoiding sugars and salts can reduce your blood pressure as much as medications.
Follow these tips and reduce your risk of developing heart disease!

Reference:
CDC 2009. Health United States, 2008. Table 71.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus08.pdf [PDF | 8.2MB]

For patients and their families, the biggest contributor to poor heart health is education, which begins with understanding the risk factors and symptoms of heart disease. In addition to education, taking steps to prevent heart disease can be life saving. Although there are excellent ways to treat heart disease, there is no doubt that the best strategy is to prevent it from happening in the first place.