Healthy life style

Written on November 13, 2009 – 12:57 pm | by Barry |

Healthy life style

We have all heard that from our parents, partner, siblings, work colleagues and sometimes from our doctor that we should have a more healthy life style. Few people take any notice of this nagging advice. Only a small number of people actual take any action.

What is a healthy life style and what is the connection between health and lifestyle.

Most people would immediately think of their diet as a life style choice so its is important that it is a healthy diet and the quantaties are appropriate. Not only the correct choices of the food types but in the quantities or portion sizes. A balanced healthy diet together with appropriate calorie intake will control weight.

Exercise is rightly considered by most to be a factor in a healthy life style but few make the effort.

Science has shown that smoking and alcohol adversly affects health. The affects are different for some peolple and can be more pronounced depending on the quantity and length of time used.

Using cocaine and steroids are again lifestyle choices and few realise the negative health implications.

Most people would say they have a stressful lifestyle. However a stressful lifestyle should not be discounted in terms of the affects on health.

One of the main issues that can be improved with a healthy life style is the health of the heart. Each of these life syle choices will have different consequences for each person and they need to be considered in conjunction with other factors.

A person with an unhealthy life style will already be damaging their heart and therefore they need to realize this together with other heart disease risk factors.

A person with a healthy life style may have other factors which raise their heart disease risk level.

You can take this opportunity to perform your own heart disease risk assessment as this will help you see what proportion of your overall risk for premature heart disease comes from your life style choices.

healthy life style

————————————————————————————————

This is part of the MyHeartRisk (My Heart Risk) series on how to prevent heart disease including:

MyHeartRisk mission: To help users better understand their personal heart disease risk factors and how to advocate for themselves with their health care providers for a more healthy and potentially longer life. To ask the question ‘What is my heart risk’ and get not only a personalized response but to have a partner on the road to improved health and longevity.

Join our MyHeartRisk online family by taking our newsletter then we can keep you informed and to get you started you will receive a free ebook
‘Preventing your heart disease’

A healthy life style is a great contributor to heart health and preventing heart disease.

No Comments | Category: Lifestyle |

Heart disease family history

Written on November 13, 2009 – 11:43 am | by Barry |

Heart disease family history

It is understandable that you may be concerned if you have a heart disease family history. If one or more of your realtives have had heart problems, especially at an earlier age than you might expect, then this is something you should look at closely.

To determine if you have a heart disease family history requires you to look at your relatives and ask the following three questions:

Do you have one or more family members whose first sign of a heart condition occurred prematurely. By prematurely we mean at age age before you would expect this to happen in the general population which is different for men and women. It is important to consider the earliest age for the relative or relatives since it makes a difference if they have a thrombosis at say 35 but went on to 60 before having a heart attack. Heart conditions can have many symptoms including cardiovascular surgery, peripheral vascular disease (PVD), heart attack or stroke.
How near a relation are those that had heart problems. A distant cousin is much less significant to estimating your risk than a parent, brother or sister.
How many relatives would fit into these to questions.

Having looked at your relatives you may want to use this information to get a more considered view as to whether you have a heart disease family history. As you might imagine each family differs in the number, ages and heart problems that may have occurred and there is no simple formula that can be applied in all cases.

A good suggestion is record your data and to draw a family tree, sometimes called a pedigree drawing. Lets look at this example:

Lets say you are Peter in this family. Peter is marked with the black arrow. The same works just as well for women. Peter is 48 years old and has an brother Bret and an sister Ann. Their parents are Henry and Rachel. If you look at the colored boxes in Henry’s square and the key above you can see he had peripheral vascular disease (PVD) at 45, a heart attack at 48 and shortly after had cardiovascular surgery. He died aged 50. Martha who is Henry’s mother, died from a heart attack aged 49. Peter’s mother Rachel has shown no symptoms of heart disease but her father Ralph had a stroke at 79.

On the family tree you see that Peter, Henry and Rachel have diabetes. Peter and others have hypertension (high blood pressure). Peter also has high cholesterol and his body mass index (BMI) of 26 shows he is overweight.

Although this drawing was done mainly for Peter it is also useful to his brother, sister and and their children.

If Peter were to show this drawing to his doctor he or she would be able to beter judge Peter’s risk for heart disease that comes from this family history.

This drawing was produced using the MyHeartRisk heart risk assessment program which is a simple online way for you to enter data about yourself and your family members. Not only can you print your family tree you also get risk charts and a detailed personal report with health recommendations

Heart disease family history

If you have the feeling that your heart disease family history needs follow up then why not get started.

————————————————————————————————

This is part of the MyHeartRisk (My Heart Risk) series on how to prevent heart disease including:

MyHeartRisk mission: To help users better understand their personal heart disease risk factors and how to advocate for themselves with their health care providers for a more healthy and potentially longer life. To ask the question ‘What is my heart risk’ and get not only a personalized response but to have a partner on the road to improved health and longevity.

Join our MyHeartRisk online family by taking our newsletter then we can keep you informed and to get you started you will receive a free ebook
‘Preventing your heart disease’

Take the time to investigate your heart disease family history while you still have time to talk to your family members.

No Comments | Category: Family history |

Heart disease risk assessment

Written on November 11, 2009 – 11:11 pm | by Barry |

Heart disease risk assessment

The MyHeartRisk heart disease risk assessment takes a different approach to others.

As well as performing a heart risk assessment this routine provides personal guidance and health recommendations as a direct response to the data entered by the user. This approach to heart disease risk assessment is based upon a relationship between the user and the program rather than the usual method of entering a few pieces of data with no follow up.

The user is prompted to input data about themselves and their family members. Another marked difference is that the data is retained and safely stored enabling the user to return as often as required.

A special importance is given to any heart disease in the user’s family by having a place to record details of any heart disease problems with family members and building their family tree to record details of heart attack, stroke, PVD and surgical cardiovascular procedure.

The output is a package written for the individual and consists of a family tree, risk charts and a detailed personal report which can be printed.
Heart disease risk assessment components Each of these are helpful to the user and their doctor. The doctor is presented with well organized and researched data without having to spend time collecting this from the user.

The user is encouraged to return to the program and update their information in response to the health recommendations and this new data is used to produce progress charts.

The significant differences between this heart disease risk assessment or other risk assessment tools are:

Personal guidance and health recommendations
Assesses heart disease risk for the individual
Secure place to hold data from the data entry
Family history given the importance it requires
Family tree, risk charts and personalized report

————————————————————————————————

Join our MyHeartRisk online family by taking our newsletter then we can keep you informed and to get you started you will receive a free ebook
‘Preventing your heart disease’

Take this opportunity to get your heart disease risk assessment.

No Comments | Category: Risk assessment |

Preventing heart disease

Written on November 11, 2009 – 12:57 pm | by Barry |

Preventing heart disease

We all take steps to avoid things we don’t like. We are careful when crossing a road, we try to avoid catching a cold, take precautions to stop getting sun burn, getting dehydrated and many more. So you might think that something as important as preventing heart disease would be one of these unpleasant things to avoid. Not dying earlier than necessary should be one of our priorities but preventing heart disease is rarely thought about and when it is considered it is maybe too late anyway.

Some of us would need something unusual to happen to make us think about preventing heart disease for ourselves.

This might be a relative having a stroke or heart attack or similar.
Maybe this happens to a friend of about the same age as ourselves.
Maybe we have a routine blood pressure or cholesterol check up and we our suprised by the results.
We finally believe the endless advice to stop smoking or shed a few pounds.

Whatever the stimulus for making us think then is the time to take action. If you wait for the symptoms to hit you then sorry its too late to think about preventing heart disease and to start worrying about dealing with heart disease.

OK so hopefully we have got your interest in this important, life changing and possibly prolonging subject and you are ready to be selfish and start thinking about yourself.

What you need to do is to get started is to find what position you are in now in what you can do to make it better. Sure if you stop smoking or reduce your weight or take exercise these will all make a difference but how much of a difference and are there other more important things to consider also.

We need to get a bit technical here and consider your heart disease risk factors which include these main groupings:

You

Are you male or female
How old are you
What is your blood pressure
How is your cholesterol

Family history

Do you have a relative whose first sign of heart disease was at an early age
How close is this family member to you
How many relatives are like this

Lifestyle

Are you overweight
Do you smoke
How good is your diet
Do you use cocaine or steroids
Do you drink too much
Are you stressed

Health conditions

Do you have diabetes
Do you have dyslipidemia

Once you know your risk factors and which are the more important and how they add up to make your heart disease risk score then you can see what can be done to get your score down and lower your risk which is the principal of preventing heart disease.

Like most things in life the benefits are in the details and nothing comes easy so you will have to do a little research and make a small effort to get the results. Ultimately you may need medical help to lower your risk but there is a lot you can do before you get to that point even if it becomes necessary.

Get started with the MyHeartRisk personal heart disease risk assessment where you first record your data and let the program assess where you are now on the heart disease risk scale. You get instructions and the time to enter data about yourself and your family members. You get back the following to help both yourself and to show to your doctor:

Heart disease is the leading cause of death and preventing heart disease or at least avoiding it for as long as possible is worth starting today.

————————————————————————————————

This is part of the MyHeartRisk (My Heart Risk) series on how to prevent heart disease including:

MyHeartRisk mission: To help users better understand their personal heart disease risk factors and how to advocate for themselves with their health care providers for a more healthy and potentially longer life. To ask the question ‘What is my heart risk’ and get not only a personalized response but to have a partner on the road to improved health and longevity.

Join our MyHeartRisk online family by taking our newsletter then we can keep you informed and to get you started you will receive a free ebook
‘Preventing your heart disease’

We hope you will take this self help program and the opportunity to start preventing heart disease.

No Comments | Category: Risk assessment |

Family heart disease

Written on November 10, 2009 – 10:02 pm | by Barry |

Family heart disease

You may have heard the expressions “heart disease runs in the family” or “they suffer with family heart disease” or “they have a heart disease family history”, or similar statements of concern, well if any of these generalities applies to your family then this should be of interest to you, your brothers and sisters (siblings), your children and other of your family members.

Family heart disease

We take it as understood that family traits such as tallness, hair color etc. can be passed down from our parents, grandparents and further back. These family features are passed down to us through the genes we inherit from our parents who in turn inherited similar genes them from their parents.

Some forms of heart disease are influenced by our genes. Scientists have only worked out the details of a few of these genes. Therefore, at present, there is no easy test which gives the full picture. We all inherit some predispositions for certain chronic diseases. An inherited predispositions may not actually cause a problem on their own but when the person is exposed to some specific environmental condition, the combination can be serious. For example, if we inherited a predisposition to premature heart disease because our body was not able to handle cholesterol adequately and at the same time our diet was such that we ate high cholesterol containing foods, the combination of these two factors would be much worse than if we only had one of the risks. Having a diet which causes high cholesterol is bad by itself but is much worse for someone who has the additional risk factor of an inherited predisposition.

So how do we know we might have family heart disease and have inherited a cardiovascular disease problem. With current science it is not possible to get a yes/no answer so for now the best we can do is to look at our family history and see what has happened with our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc. with relation to heart disease. It is a fact of life that we all have to die of something and one of the most likely causes of death in the modern world is heart disease. So having one or both parents die of heart disease in itself may not be significant.

However there are several things to look for in a family tree that can be a warning for you to look into this more closely as part of your heart disease prevention measures.

Firstly how old was the family member when they first had an event that was related to the health of their heart. For example did this person survive a heart attack at 45 and then lived to be 65.
Secondly how close a relative are they to you. Parents, brothers, sisters and your children are called first degree relatives. Your grandparents, aunts and uncles are called second degree relatives and your cousins are third degree relatives. The closer the relative with a heart problem is to you the more significant this is.
Thirdly how many of your relatives have had heart problems.

Just because you may find no family heart disease as there are no close family members with heart disease problems this does not necessarily put you in the clear. There can be a number of reasons for this including the faulty memories of surviving family members, miss diagnosis of a medical event or reason for death or your inheritance of a new strain of heart condition or something else entirely.

Accurately interpreting any family history of heart disease requires medical training and experience. Even some general practice physicians do not have the knowledge and experience to recognize a heart disease family history, although they may not admit to this.

If you are concerned about what your family heart disease means to you, your siblings, your children or any other family members then you should look into this further and get a heart risk assessment.

Ask yourself the question is my family’s history of heart disease a concern to me

If you have had heart problems at an early age then you should make this clear to other family members as this family medical history is important especially to your children and grandchildren.

————————————————————————————————

This is part of the MyHeartRisk (My Heart Risk) series including:

MyHeartRisk mission: To help users better understand their personal heart disease risk factors and how to advocate for themselves with their health care providers for a more healthy and potentially longer life. To ask the question ‘What is my heart risk’ and get not only a personalized response but to have a partner on the road to improved health and longevity.

Join our MyHeartRisk online family by taking our newsletter then we can keep you informed and to get you started you will receive a free ebook
‘Preventing your heart disease’

Why not take the time to see if family heart disease applies to your family

No Comments | Category: Family history |

Heart disease risk

Written on November 10, 2009 – 4:19 pm | by Barry |

Heart disease risk

Your heart disease risk is the chance of you getting heart disease in the next 10 years. This obviously assumes that you do not have heart disease already.

Hopefully your heart disease risk is lower or about the same as the average for the population for your age and gender or it may be slightly above the average or much higher than the average.

If you knew that your risk was high then hopefully you want to do what you reasonably can to get it as close as possible to the average. A higher than average heart disease risk does not necessarily mean you will soon die of heart disease and some people with low risks do die of heart disease. That is because our health is a complex subject and even the medics do not yet understand it all.

It is possible to study an individual and this is done by looking at three groupings of heart disease risk factors:

Family history
If you have a history of heart disease in your family then you may have a higher heart disease risk
Lifestyle
If you have a less than optimal life style then this may contribute to a higher chance of heart problems
Health conditions
If you have such health conditions as high blood pressure, diabetes, abnormal cholesterol etc. then these may have a negative affect also.

OK so now you know the basic outline of the problem but what you really need to know is how this all applies to you.
How do you judge if you have a family history of heart disease?
You probably have an idea if your lifestyle is poor if you are overweight or if you smoke but how poor is it and what difference does it make.
If you do suffer with hypertension or diabetes then these are negative heart disease risk factors but the severity will depend on how these conditions are being treated.

The only proper way to get an assessment of your heart disease risk is to get outside help to look at you as an individual and study your data or to “crunch you numbers”.
Ultimately you may need professional medical help including medication to sufficiently lower your risk but there is a lot you can do before you get to that point even if it becomes necessary.
The place to start is to get a thorough personal risk assessment where you first record your data and let the program assess where you are now on the heart disease risk scale.
By using the MyHeartRisk personal heart disease risk assessment you get help and the time to enter data about yourself and your family members. You get back invaluable aids to both yourself and to share with your doctor including

Heart disease risk assessment components
You owe it to yourself and your family to look after yourself. Heart disease is the leading cause of death and preventing heart disease or at least postponing it for as long as possible is a sensible precaution that you can take starting today.

————————————————————————————————

This is part of the MyHeartRisk (My Heart Risk) series on how to prevent heart disease including:

MyHeartRisk mission: To help users better understand their personal heart disease risk factors and how to advocate for themselves with their health care providers for a more healthy and potentially longer life. To ask the question ‘What is my heart risk’ and get not only a personalized response but to have a partner on the road to improved health and longevity.

Join our MyHeartRisk online family by taking our newsletter then we can keep you informed and to get you started you will receive a free ebook
‘Preventing your heart disease’

We hope you will take this opportunity to lower your heart disease risk.

No Comments | Category: Risk assessment |

Family history of heart disease

Written on November 10, 2009 – 1:15 pm | by Barry |

Family history of heart disease

If you think you have a heart disease family history then what you will read here is important to you.

First let us look more closely at what the medical profession consider as a family history of heart disease. There are three areas to look for:

Is there at least one family member who has shown signs of premature heart problems. Premature is not well defined and would be different for a male and female family member. In this case we can consider premature to mean the family member’s age when they had their first symptom of heart disease was younger than would normally be expected. Heart problems can include stroke, heart attack, peripheral vascular disease (PVD) or cardiovascular surgery such as a bypass or stint.
Is this relative, or relatives if more than one, a near relative to you. How near a relative is to you is easily measured as follows: Parents, brothers and sisters and your children are the nearest of your relatives. Grandparents together with aunts and uncles are the next nearest. Cousins are the next nearest and anyone else in the family is less significant for consideration here.
How many of your family members can you count in the above categories.

Using these ways of looking at your family history of heart disease you can see if you might have a concern that requires further investigation. Since every family is different with some family members having different heart problems and at different ages it is difficult to get a simple yes no answer to having a heart disease family history.

One way to get an overview is to draw a family tree or what the medics call a pedigree drawing. Lets look at this example:

Consider yourself to be the person Peter in this family. You can find Peter with the black arrow pointer. The principal works just as well for females. Peter is aged 48 and has an older brother Bret and an older sister Ann. Peter, Bret and Ann have parents Henry and Rachel. Henry had heart problems that started with peripheral vascular disease at 45, he suffered a heart attack at 48 and shortly afterwards had cardiovascular surgery. He lived for another 2 years and died aged 50. Henry’s mother Martha died from a heart attack aged 49. Fortunately Peter’s mother Rachel has so far not shown symptoms of heart disease although her father Ralph had a stroke aged 79.

The family tree also records the medical conditions of the family members, for example Peter, Henry and Rachel have diabetes. Peter, Henry, Martha, Rachel and Bret have hypertension (high blood pressure). Peter has cholesterol problems and is overweight with a body mass index (BMI) of 26.

Although this family tree has been drawn up for Peter’s benefit it is also useful to Bret and Ann and their children Joyce, Susan and John.

When Peter shows this family tree to his doctor or healthcare advisor they will be able to help Peter to better understand his family history of heart disease because most of the information is included without the need for Peter to go away and talk to his relatives.

MyHeartRisk has a simple way for you to enter data about yourself and your family members to be able to print out your own family tree as seen in this example. This is called a risk assessment and not only will you be able to print your family tree you also get risk charts and a detailed personal report with health recommendations

If you have the feeling that your family history of heart disease needs investigating then here is the right tool for you. You will look back and see that it was worth it and hopefully you will be able to continue looking back for many more years to come.

————————————————————————————————

This is part of the MyHeartRisk (My Heart Risk) series on how to prevent heart disease including:

MyHeartRisk mission: To help users better understand their personal heart disease risk factors and how to advocate for themselves with their health care providers for a more healthy and potentially longer life. To ask the question ‘What is my heart risk’ and get not only a personalized response but to have a partner on the road to improved health and longevity.

Join our MyHeartRisk online family by taking our newsletter then we can keep you informed and to get you started you will receive a free ebook
‘Preventing your heart disease’

Take the time to investigate your family history of heart disease while you still have time!

No Comments | Category: Family history |

Cardiovascular risk calculator

Written on November 1, 2009 – 7:43 pm | by Barry |

The cardiovascular risk calculator from My Heart Risk is not like any other as it takes the principal of calculating risk but then provides a comprehensive personal service including a family tree, risk charts and a detailed report with health recommendations.

The concept of using a cardiovascular risk calculator where quick math is performed giving an instant answer is not what is needed for this important life changing and hopefully life prolonging process of your heart disease prevention. MyHeartRisk not only performs as a cardiovascular risk calculator but does much more and at the level of the individual.

The first step is to enter your data, this 5 minute video will take you through the process

Now the MyHeartRisk cardiovascular risk calculator provides your own family tree. Your family tree (also known as a pedigree drawing) shows which of your family members have had heart problems such as a heart attack or stroke.

You also get risk charts showing your 10, 20 and 30 year risk and your total risk broken down by risk factors.

Your personalized report is a multi-page summary of your heart disease risk together with health recommendations.

Follow these links to see examples

This report will be easily understandable by yourself but you should show this to your doctor as he or she will find it most useful as you are providing well presented information about yourself and you are helping your physician to better help you.

The final part of the My Heart Risk cardiovascular risk calculator is the production of progress charts:

These progress charts will show you the improvements you have made and will continue to make by following the personal report health recommendations and your doctor’s advice.

To get started you should use the MyHeartRisk cardiovascular risk calculator .

————————————————————————————————

This is part of the MyHeartRisk (My Heart Risk) series on how to prevent heart disease including:

MyHeartRisk mission: To help users better understand their personal heart disease risk factors and how to advocate for themselves with their health care providers for a more healthy and potentially longer life. To ask the question ‘What is my heart risk’ and get not only a personalized response but to have a partner on the road to improved health and longevity.

Join our MyHeartRisk online family by taking our newsletter then we can keep you informed and to get you started you will receive a free ebook
‘Preventing your heart disease’

No Comments | Category: Risk assessment |

Heart MOT

Written on November 1, 2009 – 5:12 pm | by Barry |

Heart MOT: how long will your heart keep motoring

We all hope our car will run well and efficiently so we get it regularly serviced and repaired.

We all hope our life will be as long as possible and that we will have good health but most do not think about getting a heart MOT which would tell us what about our heart needs servicing.

It would seem we think our car is more important than our heart health!

As a minimum a heart MOT should include:

Cholesterol test
Blood pressure
Blood suger

But what can you do with the results and what do they mean to you?

You should take your results and use then to get a personal heart risk assessment from My Heart Risk.

————————————————————————————————

This is part of the MyHeartRisk (My Heart Risk) series on how to prevent heart disease including:

MyHeartRisk mission: To help users better understand their personal heart disease risk factors and how to advocate for themselves with their health care providers for a more healthy and potentially longer life. To ask the question ‘What is my heart risk’ and get not only a personalized response but to have a partner on the road to improved health and longevity.

Join our MyHeartRisk online family by taking our newsletter then we can keep you informed and to get you started you will receive a free ebook
‘Preventing your heart disease’

No Comments | Category: Risk assessment |

Heart risk assessment

Written on November 1, 2009 – 12:12 am | by Barry |

The My Heart Risk heart risk assessment takes a very different approach from others.

MyHeartRisk not only performs a heart disease risk assessment but provides personal guidance and health recommendations as a direct response to the data entered by the individual. This unique approach to heart risk assessment is based upon a longterm relationship between the individual and the program rather than the standard method of entering a few pieces of generalized data.

The My Heart Risk user is given simple instructions to research and then input data about themselves and their family members. Another fundamental difference between the My Heart Risk heart disease risk assessment and others is that the data is retained and securely stored which enables the user to return as often as required to build up their personal database.

Yet another significant difference is the special importance given by My Heat Risk to the family history of heart disease. In order to collect the necessary details of any heart disease problems with family members My Heart Risk encourages the user to build their family tree and record details of heart attack, stroke, PVD and surgical cardiovascular procedure. The longterm partnership between the user and My Heart Risk enables the necessary time to find out and then enter personal information and family members. The heart disease risk assessment program will analyze all the information and prompt the user where significant data is not provided.

The data is used by the heart risk assessment procedure to prepare an individual multipage package consisting of the family tree, risk charts and personal report which can be printed. Each of these can be readily understood by the user but are designed to be invaluable to the user’s doctor or other healthcare advisor. By collecting all of this information and having it collated into this organized format the user can provide their doctor with far more information than would normally be available from several consultations.

Once the user acts upon the health recommendations included in the personal report, and other advice, the user returns to My Heart Risk and updates their personal database of information. Due to the longterm relationship the next major feature of MyHeartRisk is then used to provide progress charts showing the improvement in risk over time. These progress charts not only provide encouragement to the user to continue their efforts but give feedback to their healthcare advisor.

In summary the major differences between the MyHeartRisk heart risk assessment or other major heart disease risk assessment tools are:

Personal guidance and health recommendations
Longterm relationship using secure database for data entry
Special importance given to family history of heart disease
Prompts for important missing data
Family tree, risk charts and personal report

No Comments | Category: Health risks |

Heart disease prevention

Categories

Recent Posts

Archives

Free ebook

Pages

Healthy life style