Heart Disease: Lower Your Risk
The Facts
There are several steps you can take to reduce your risk of heart disease: don't smoke, improve your diet and exercise. Maintaining a healthy weight also reduces your risk for diabetes and high blood pressure.How Do Exercise, Eating Well and Not Smoking Help Fight Heart Disease?
- Smoking: Smoking increases blood pressure, decreases your ability to exercise and increases the tendency of your blood to clot, all of which contribute to heart disease. Smoking also reduces HDL, or "good," cholesterol. Not smoking will help you reduce all of those risk factors.
- Exercise and eating well: Regular exercise and a healthy diet are key to maintaining a healthy weight. That's important, because being overweight (defined as having a Body Mass Index of 25 or higher) is a major risk factor for heart disease. Overweight people are also more likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes, high blood fat and low levels of good cholesterol, which are also risk factors for heart disease.
What Can I Do?
- If you smoke, quit. If you don't smoke, don't start.
- Get regular exercise. Walk briskly about 30 minutes a day and do something more vigorous for an hour each week.
- Make your diet rich in fruits, vegetables and whole-grain, high-fiber food
- Eat fish, especially oily fish such as salmon and tuna, twice a week.
- Limit your intake of fatty foods as well as food and drinks with added sugars.
- Eat and prepare foods with little or no salt.
- Limit your alcohol consumption - one drink per day for women and two for men.
Why Choose UVa for Heart Disease Treatment?
Patients at UVa benefit from a team approach at UVa's Heart and Vascular Center that brings together cardiologists, surgeons and interventional radiologists to provide one-stop care on an inpatient or outpatient basis. UVa staff will help you manage your risk factors and use noninvasive methods to diagnose problems. UVa offers a full range of treatment options based on your needs, including diet and exercise plans, drug therapy and minimally invasive surgical procedures.UVa has been named one of America's top 50 hospitals for heart care and heart surgery by U.S. News & World Report. UVa also has the only accredited Chest Pain Center in the region to assess and treat heart attacks.