Health Center - Heart Health
Small lifestyle changes can go a long way in preventing heart disease and stroke, so learn more and start protecting yourself today. If you're living with heart disease, read up on management strategies, from who should be part of your medical team to treatment options to consider.
What You Need to Know to Prevent Heart Disease
- Age
- Family history
- Smoking tobacco
- Physical inactivity
- Overweight/obesity
- High blood pressure, also called hypertension
- High LDL, or "bad" cholesterol, and/or low HDL, or "good" cholesterol
- Pre-diabetes or diabetes
Many of these factors tend to cluster—if you have one, you are likely to have others, too. For example, someone who is obese is very likely to develop diabetes, to not be getting enough exercise and to have high cholesterol and blood pressure.
How you respond to stress and drinking too much alcohol can also make you more vulnerable to heart disease.
While some risk factors are beyond your control, such as increasing age and family history of early heart disease, the lifestyle choices you make every day can have a big impact on your risk of heart disease.
