Many people with peripheral artery disease avoid walking because it may cause pain. But patients who had two in-person sessions and two phone sessions with physical therapists to encourage walking over three months walked 18 yards farther over 6 minutes than those who got usual care.
“In short-term clinical trials looking at changes in blood pressure and blood vessel dilation, cocoa flavanols looked promising, and reductions in cholesterol and inflammatory markers were also seen in some trials,” says JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
When it comes to protecting your heart, you know the basics. Don’t smoke. Keep a lid on “bad” cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar with a healthy diet and, if necessary, medications. Exercise on most days. Limit weight gain. But you may not know about other key steps to protect the old ticker. Here are a handful.
Ever wonder if that chest pain you’re feeling could be a heart attack? You’re not alone.
“We have 6.5 million visits to the emergency department every year in the United States and 4 million office visits for a complaint of chest pain,” says Martha Gulati, president-elect of the American Society for Preventive Cardiology.
Atrial fibrillation—aka AFib or AF—is an irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia) in the upper chambers (atria) of the heart. In AFib, random irregular electrical signals cause the atria to quiver. So some of the blood stays behind in the atria, which makes the blood more likely to clot.
AFib can cause rapid, fluttering, or pounding heartbeats, lightheadedness, extreme fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pain...or no symptoms at all.
An estimated 20 to 30 percent of people with high blood pressure have resistant hypertension. That typically means their pressure is still high even though they’re taking several drugs to lower it.
Lowering your LDL (“bad”) cholesterol cuts your risk of a heart attack. How to do it? Replace saturated fats (red meat, cheese, butter, coconut oil, fatty sweets, etc.) with unsaturated fats (oil, salad dressing, mayo, nuts, fish, avocado, etc.).
Replacing some ordinary salt with potassium salt can cut the risk of stroke.
Researchers randomly assigned roughly 21,000 people living in 600 rural Chinese villages to use either ordinary salt (sodium chloride) or a salt that was 75 percent sodium chloride and 25 percent potassium chloride. All the participants had a history of stroke or were 60 or older and had poorly controlled blood pressure (140 or higher with drugs or 160 or higher without drugs).
