Good Heart, Great Life!

Take these tips to heart to lower your risk of heart disease.

Eat right, exercise daily and never ever smoke. We all know the rules for keeping our heart healthy, but are there other ways to keep our ticker primed? Here, we look at simple ways to avoid the lesser-known heart risks.

LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE

Your attitude to stress can influence your heart health as much as the stress itself, with optimism being a major protective factor, says cardiologist Dr Jason Kaplan.

Nobody can be optimistic all the time, but if you think your attitude might need an overhaul, check your social media posts. Twitter language has been used to analyse positive or negative attitudes and predict death from atherosclerotic heart disease (AHD) even more accurately than smoking, blood pressure, diabetes and obesity combined.

Posts with words like “goals”, “excellent” and “strength” are linked to lower AHD risk, while “hate”, “bored” and “stupid” are associated with higher AHD risk.

Check Your Kidneys

“There is a very strong link between kidney disease and heart disease,” says Dr Jason. “When your kidneys are in trouble, it is often your heart that bears the brunt.”

Kidney diseases do not always produce symptoms, so it is worth including a kidney function test as part of your annual check-up.

A simple blood test to measure creatinine – a waste product of muscles normally filtered out by healthy kidneys – could provide a vital clue to your cardiovascular risk.