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We asked cardiologists for recommendations on how to keep their center healthy for years to come.
By Nina Agrawal
If you’re one of the millions of Americans who have come up with a New Year’s solution to lose weight, exercise, or eat better, here’s one more explanation for why sticking with it: It can damage your heart.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. And habits like smoking, poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle can lay the groundwork for disease long before symptoms appear. These habits “won’t kill you the next day,” but they may dictate how well you live in the last decades of your life, said Dr. Kyla Lara-Breitinger, a cardiologist and an assistant professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
“If you say you’re going to walk in the Dolomites when you retire, what are you doing now to prepare?she said.
Doctors can use your blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and blood sugar levels to anticipate the risk of central disease and recommend possible treatments. So start by visiting your primary care doctor to check your numbers, said Dr. Sadiya Khan, a preventive cardiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
A visit to your GP is also an opportunity to communicate your fitness goals. You can communicate to them what might be holding you back from achieving them and chart a path for change.
“It can be overwhelming to try to do everything at once,” Dr. Khan said. But you can tell your doctor how to start with what’s simplest or what adjustments would make the biggest difference.
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