Saturday, February 26, 2011

End of the month

If you have not visited the American Heart Association website, this is a good time to do so. From time to time in some of my classes, I will ask my participants to call out to me the warning signs of a heart attack. They can usually name them all. The AHA has some interesting facts about heart attacks and women. For instance, did you know that more women die from heart attacks annually than the next four causes of death combined including cancers? There are certain uncontrollable risk factors for heart disease such as male sex, older age, family history of heart disease, and being post-menopausal (females). We can't do much about those, but there are the controllable risk factors that we can modify with some effort. For instance smoking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and physical inactivity are risk factors that we can change to improve our chances for a good healthy heart. Visit the American Heart Association website and take the Heart Attack Risk Assessment. It's fun! It only takes a few minutes and you will feel really good when your risk assessment is low. It could be that you need to do a little work and in that case, your risk assessment won't be quite so low. Look at it this way: there's time. Hopefully.