Heart Disease

Heart attacks kill thousands of people each day. Knowing how to react properly can save your life or the life of someone you love. Learning ways to avoid a heart attack or any form of heart disease in the first place may add even more years to your future. This website combines the efforts of doctors, featuring Dr. Tareneh Razavi the in-house doctor at Google, heart attack survivors and web site professionals to educate you about everything you might what to know about a heart attack and heart disease in an easy to follow format. Sections include warning signs prior to a heart attack, recognizing symptoms of a heart attack, what to do while having a heart attack, expectations in the hospital as a heart attack patient, heart disease treatments, recovery post heart attack, and heart disease prevention.

In a perfect world we would love every young person to read this site thoroughly regarding heart disease prevention and follow a lifestyle resulting eliminating the need for the sections on having a heart attack. In reality, people should find helpful information here no matter what stage they may be at in the time line of a heart attack or how they may be related to the heart attack patient.

Heart attack and heart disease information pages take the form of FAQs commonly known as Frequently Asked Questions. Most questions came from actual heart attack survivors with answers from medical doctors including Dr. Razavi.

We hope you find the answers you may be searching for here on our heart attack and heart disease information pages, but remember these sites should supplement what your own doctor may say and make you a more informed patient or caretaker. Never ignore your own physician’s advice to follow a suggestion made here. Each heart attack and each heart attack patient presents a unique situation. You and your doctor together should plan what works best for you. The more you know, however, the more you may take an active part in that process and the more you understand about heart attacks and heart disease the more likely you may be to follow procedures to improve your condition. Enjoy reading our heart attack and heart disease pages and best of luck to you!

Heart Diet and Exercise

Your doctor says you need to make some changes in your life: Start a heart-healthy diet, exercise a little, stop smoking, and more. You also walked away with some medication to take. Perhaps you're wondering: Why can't medicine alone do the trick? Does lifestyle really make a difference?

The Truth About Lifestyle and Heart Disease

The truth is, drugs won't cure heart disease, though it can certainly help control it. That means your lifestyle does matter -- a lot.

For starters, it's likely that some aspects of your lifestyle may have put you at risk for heart disease. These are called risk factors. Here's a list of common risk factors for heart disease:

• Smoking tobacco
• Having high blood pressure
• Being overweight
• Having unhealthy blood fat and cholesterol levels
• Having diabetes
• Being physically inactive
• Being over 55 years old for men and over 65 years old for women
• Having family members who had heart disease or a heart attack early in life: under 55 for your father or brother; under 65 for your mother or sister

Some heart disease risk factors you can't control, such as your age or health problems of your parents. However, some risk factors are related to your lifestyle, such as smoking, being overweight, and having an unhealthy diet. These lifestyle factors may have helped contribute to your heart disease. And these same risk factors will continue to make your heart disease get worse.

Luckily, the opposite is true as well. Adopting a heart-healthy diet and a healthier lifestyle can improve your health, even if you already have high blood pressure or other forms of heart disease. Here's what a heart-healthy lifestyle can do for you:

• Lower your blood pressure
• Lower your bad cholesterol and triglyceride (blood fat) levels
• Ease the stress on your heart
• Lower your risk of heart attack
• Lower your risk of stroke
• Prolong your life

Choosing a heart-healthy diet and lifestyle can even help your medications work more effectively. In some cases you might even be able to reduce or eliminate some medications.

But what exactly is a heart-healthy lifestyle? And how do you get started in making changes toward one? Let's take a closer look at seven lifestyle areas where changes can make a huge difference to your heart health:

• Smoking
• Body weight
• Diet
• Use of sodium
• Exercise
• Alcohol
• Stress control

Smoking and Your Heart

Let's get right to the bad news you probably already know: Smoking hurts your heart and blood vessels -- not to mention your lungs. Here's how:

• Nicotine from cigarettes tightens your blood vessels, which causes your blood pressure to rise and makes your heart work harder.
• Smoking lowers the amount of oxygen and increases the amount of poisonous carbon monoxide in your blood. Your heart ends up needing more oxygen but has less ability to get it. This increases the chances of having a heart attack.