Preventive Care for Heart Disease: Early Signs and Screenings

When it comes to your heart health, prevention is the best medicine. This is especially true for heart disease. What makes heart disease hard to detect early is that its risk factors are subtle and often go unnoticed. By the time symptoms become apparent, the condition may have progressed beyond the point of prevention.

Keep reading to learn more about preventive care for heart disease, including which risk factors you can change, what your screening schedule should be, how often blood pressure and cholesterol should be checked and when you need to seek medical care right away.

The Risk Factors You Can Change

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the leading preventable risk factors for heart disease and stroke include:

• High LDL cholesterol
• Obesity
• Physical inactivity
• Poor nutrition
• Smoking
• Type 2 diabetes

The American Heart Association emphasizes the ability to control some risk factors, including cholesterol intake, physical activity and blood pressure management.

Blood Pressure

The American Heart Association recommends that you measure your blood pressure at least once a year if you’ve never had high blood pressure or other risk factors for heart disease. If you do have high blood pressure or other risk factors for heart disease, talk with your doctor about how often you should get screened.

Measuring your blood pressure matters because elevated levels usually have no symptoms. This means that one of the only ways to catch it early and prevent long-term health effects is to get screened regularly.

Cholesterol

The baseline interval for cholesterol screening, as determined by the American Heart Association, is once every four to six years. If you’ve already been diagnosed with high cholesterol or have a family history of the condition, you may need to have it checked more often.

Family history of high cholesterol is an important factor to consider. The reality is that many patients either don’t know or never mention it during their appointments. But if a parent or sibling has high cholesterol or had a cardiac event when they were younger, it’s important that you share that information. Doing so gives your doctor more information to determine how often you should get screened.

Physical Activity

It’s recommended that healthy adults get 150 minutes of moderate exercise each week, with common examples including brisk walking or bicycling. While getting a total of 150 minutes of exercise per week can feel difficult, it can be broken up into thirty minutes, five days a week, which seems much more manageable for most people. The American Heart Association notes that physical activity helps regulate blood cholesterol levels and helps prevent diabetes and obesity, which are among the higher risk factors associated with heart disease.

Building Your Own Screening Schedule

One of the most effective ways to build your own screening schedule is to ask your doctor:

• What should be checked and how often
• What your last set of numbers were and whether they changed
• Whether your family history changes any screening timelines
• Which kind of change would make the most impact

Once you discuss these points, your clinician can create a personalized screening schedule based on your overall health. Following a preventive care plan is much easier to keep up with when it’s streamlined rather than separate appointments. It’s worth taking the time to work with your doctor to develop a customized plan to help you prevent heart disease.

Expert Care for Matters of the Heart

Whether you’re looking to create a screening schedule or discuss heart disease risk factors, our cardiologists are here to help. Learn more about our heart and vascular care services or find a cardiologist near you. We’re committed to protecting all that your heart holds.