Protect Your Heart Each And Every day Of Your Life By Living A Healthy Lifestyle.

Make Lifestyle changes that can help reduce your risk for heart problems.

Former Heart Surgeon Revealed How To Prevent & Even Reverse Heart Disease Without Drugs Or Surgery .. Click Here To Learn The Secrets !!

Excerpted Fm Heart-Healthy Living.

Detection
Diagnosis of heart failure is based on :
- Symptoms
- Medical history
- Physical examination
- Chest radiograph
- electrocardiogram (ECG)
- Other imaging tests
- Cardiac catheterisation

Treatment
Heart failure is usually treated with lifestyle changes and medicine. Sometimes, surgery is required to correct abnormalities of the heart or heart valves.

Congenital heart defects and abnormal heart valves can be repaired with surgery. Coronary artery diseases can be treated with angioplasty or a heart bypass surgery.

For patients with severe heart failure, the heart muscle may become so damaged that available treatments are unable to help. End-stage heart failure patients can consider heart transplantation.

Other than lifestyle modifications, medical advances are at hand to help. With this arsenal of modern know-how, heart diseases need no longer to be as fatal as they used to be.

Tips for a healthy heart
Food for thought
Avoid high cholesterol food and saturated fats. Choose lean meat, fish and low-fat dairy products instead and increase your intake of fruit and vegetables.

Active lifestyle
Exercise at least three times a week to prevent heart and blood vessel diseases. Although there are many kind of physical activities, brisk walking is one of the best. Check with your doctor to see what is suitable for you.
Hot tip: One of the best exercise is walking. Try walking whenever and where ever possible for at least 30-40 mins each day.

Stop Smoking
Heart disease is more common among smokers. Smoking is a major contributor to heart disease risk. High-risk groups also get heart diseases earlier. To reduce your risk of getting heart disease, STOP SMOKING.

Weight Watch
Maintaining a healthy body weight reduces the risks of heart disease. To give you a good idea of whether you are keeping a healthy weight, your body mass index [BMI = weight(kg)/Height(m) x Height(m)] should not be more than 23. The waist-to-hip ratio is another useful guide. A ratio of more than 0.9 for men and 0.85 for women indicates increased health risks.

Relax
Manage stress by engaging in regular exercise. It is important to have work-life balance. As far as possible, relax to ease the tension whenever feelings of stress arise since stress may aggravate heart disease.

Take care of your heart …. it yours and you only have ONE !!

Article Extracted Fm: Dr. Ng Wai Lin.

According to the World Heart Federation, heart disease is the world’s leading cause of death, causing one in three deaths. And adding to the bad news, men are three to five times more likely to contract heart disease as compared to women.

Though the figures may be disheartening, heart diseases can be prevented, managed and treated.  Using medicines, changing diet, exercise and lifestyle habits, and opting for surgeries and even heart transplants, can help sufferers of heart diseases.

Coronary Artery Disease
Coronary artery disease is one of the leading causes of death in Singapore.  However, it can be prevented by managing its risk factors.
Risk factors for coronary artery diseases can be largely divided into non-modifiable factors and modifiable factors.

Non-modifiable risk factors:
- Increased age
- Male, and female after menopause
- Ethnicity: South Asians and Malays are at higher risk than Chinese
- Family history

While you can’t change your gender, your family and the fact that you age, there are modifiable factors that could vastly improve your chances of having a healthy heart.

Modifiable risk fators:
- High blood cholesterol
- High blood pressure/hypertension
- Diabetes mellitus and abnormal blood sugar levels
- Menopause
- Obesity
- Physical inactivity
- Smoking
- Stress

Heart Failure
Heart failure occurs when the heart loses the ability to pump enough blood to the body’s tissues, resulting in insufficient oxygen and nutrients for proper functioning of the main body organs and other tissues.  Our brain cells can die if deprived of oxygen for more than three minutes.  Our muscle cells live on for several hours while our bone and skin cells can stay alive for several days.

Blockages in the arteries (coronary artery disease), disease of the heart valves and irregular heartbeats (arrhythmia) are common causes of heart failure.

Causes
The most common causes of heart failure are :
- Coronary heart disease and heart attack (which ma be “silent”)
- Cardiomyopathy (disease of the heart muscles)
- High blood pressure (hypertension)
- Heart valve disease
- Congenital heart disease
- Alcoholism and drug abuse

Symptoms
A person with heart failure may experience shortness of breath and coughing caused by the fluid build-up in the lungs or pulmonary oedema.  It may cause the person to cough up bubbnly phlegm containing blood.  Other symptoms of heart failure include fluid build-up in the veins and body tissues causing swelling of the feet, legs and abdomen.  When body tissues, such as organs and muscles, do not receive enough oxygen and nutrients, they cannot function well, leading to tiredness and dizziness.

To understand the various detection and treatment mentods available … click here