Heart Health

Listen to your body. Listen to your heart. Early warning signs may include unexplained fatigue, reduced exercise tolerance, shortness of breath or chest discomfort during routine or more than usual activity, dizziness, blackouts (syncope), palpitations (feeling of increased or missed heartbeats). However, heart disease often develops silently without symptoms especially in the elderly, diabetics, and women.

Lower the better. For most adults, a healthy resting heart rate falls between 60 and 100 beats per minute. The more active you are physiologically, lower is the resting heart rate, due to heightened vagal tone. In fact, well-trained individuals often show heart rates as low as 40 to 50 beats per minute, which reflects an efficient heart muscle. A resting heart rate that is consistently above 100, consistently below 50 without a history of endurance training, or that has shifted noticeably from your own baseline is worth discussing with your physician.

Depends on who you are and what genes you inherited. Even healthy adults should undergo routine cardiac risk assessment including, but not limited to an Apo B test, Lipoprotein A {Lp(a)}, advanced lipid profile test, blood sugar fasting, HbA1c, and an hs-CRP test. Blood pressure should be checked at least annually if normal and more frequently if high. Blood sugar and cholesterol levels should be checked starting at the age of 19-20 years, and repeated every 5 years if normal, and every 6 months to a year if abnormal or if other risk factors are present. If you have a strong family history of premature heart disease (heart disease runs in the immediate family members), then these tests can be done in early childhood.

Get your act together. Smoking, an unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, excess body weight, poor sleep quality, high psychosocial stress, uncontrolled blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes are the most important modifiable risk factors. Addressing them early is the most reliable way to reduce heart disease risk.

Move, Move and Move. Cardiovascular disease prevention begins with regular physical activity. At least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise per week and strength training twice a week helps improve circulation, lower blood pressure, regulate cholesterol, and strengthen the heart muscle.

Keep it simple and keep it natural, keep it colourful. A heart-healthy diet incorporates greens and colours with rich servings of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, fish, and healthy fats such as olive oil. Evidence-based dietary patterns such as the Mediterranean or DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet are the best. Limiting processed foods, excess salt, and refined sugars is equally important.

Yes, ofcourse. To lower blood pressure naturally, reduce salt intake, eat more potassium-rich vegetables and fruit, exercise regularly, limit alcohol, improve sleep, and lose excess weight. To lower cholesterol naturally, increase soluble fibre from oats, legumes and psyllium, replace saturated fats with unsaturated ones, eat oily fish and nuts, and stay physically active. These changes are genuinely effective, but they are not a substitute for medication when readings are high or when an inherited condition such as familial hypercholesterolaemia is present. Your physician should decide that with you.

A simple non-invasive, ultrasound-based test to pick up early plaque formation in your arteries. A CIMT test, or carotid intima-media thickness test, is a non-invasive ultrasound that measures the thickness of the inner two layers of the carotid artery wall in the neck. Thickening of these layers is one of the earliest structural signs of atherosclerosis, often appearing before any plaque or symptom develops. The scan takes around 15 minutes, uses no radiation and requires no injection, which makes it useful for tracking arterial changes over time in younger adults and in people whose standard risk calculators sit in an uncertain range.