Unfortunately, about one out of every five people present by dying suddenly with heart disease, so this is something that we need to attack before you actually have heart disease. Traditionally, men who are over 50 and women who are postmenopausal are at risk. People who are overweight, people who smoke, have high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, those are the typical people who are at risk. Heart disease is a whole combination of things, including problems with the muscles such as heart failure, including abnormal heart rhythms. The most common though is problems with blocked arteries which is usually precipitated with a heart attack ,but also could be chronic problems like angina, which is chest pain or tightness in your chest. The typical thing that we do for screening is you should have your blood pressure checked regularly. You should have your cholesterol monitored regularly. There are certain screening tools that are outpatient testings such as a stress test, which is where you walk on a treadmill or we give medication and monitor your heart to see whether or not you have any blocked arteries. There's a special type of CAT scan we could do which monitors calcium in your arteries to see whether you're at risk of having heart disease or not. And we do the diagnostic testing which confirms that you have heart disease with something called a heart catheterization, which is a test where we inject dye into the arteries of your heart, take moving pictures to see if you have blocked arteries. If that's confirmed, then there are, we could do things like stenting which is when we put a balloon catheter down your artery and open up the artery to restore normal blood supply. There's bypass surgery, where we we put in special grafts from either your chest or your leg so to bypass the blockages. And of course there's medications that we could give you to, to allow the heart to adapt to the blockages. And of course it's controlling your risk factors like medications to give you for you to control your blood pressure your diabetes, your cholesterol. We have a full team of cardiovascular specialists in this hospital who all get together once a week to discuss the patients with heart disease and determine what the best way to treat these patients are. So whether it's surgical, whether it's medication, whether it's a stent procedure. So we have and we also have two highly skilled arrhythmia specialists who treat people with abnormal heartbeats or weakened heart muscles to prevent them from dying suddenly. The main thing that people could do on their own, they could exercise regularly, they can lose weight, obviously stop smoking, take your medications as prescribed. Those are the things that a patient could do. It's, so it's really leading a generally healthy activity. Those should be going for people who not only have heart disease, but people to prevent heart disease from happening in the first place.
We know now the people who have regular sleep are less likely to have coronary disease and we recommend that people sleep at least seven hours ideally eight to nine hours a day. Snoring can be a sign that at night times you're not getting enough oxygen and that stress actually raises your blood pressure. People who snore generally tend to be a little bit overweight, tend to have higher blood pressure, and that can indirectly be a risk factor for not only atherosclerosis or heart disease but for a trial fibrillation. It's not just the lack of oxygen it's also the higher blood pressure, the higher weight so that all the factors work together. There area percentage of women that, despite doing all of the right things, are at risk for what we call preeclampsia which is an elevation and your blood pressure. So, it's a normal process of when you get pregnant that you increase your blood volume. Make sure that you follow your blood pressure. Women are 10 times more likely to die of heart disease than they are breast cancer, something that I think a lot of people don't realize and it leads to problems because women are less likely when they have symptoms--chest pain, shortness of breath--to actually seek medical attention. People who are around other people tend to be more active. So, when you have a friend go for a walk together and talk with that friend. Go with your spouse take a walk every day. It's not a simple relationship but clearly social isolation is increased risk factor for not just heart disease but for mortality overall.