From the Heart
You’ve eaten too much. You’ve promised to never do it again. This year is going to be different. You’ve made your New Year’s resolution. You think you are indestructible, that life will go on whatever your excesses, and then, “Wam, bam, thank you, Ma’am,” a sinking feeling from the heart tells you that even the best laid plans have expiration dates. That pressure on the chest, pain in the jaw radiating down the left arm, or air hunger spells “I told you so,” as you hover above your body and make that journey toward the white light. If only you’d listened, if only bran muffins had trumped jelly rolls, if only that primordial spark and DNA imprint in your genes had coded for an unconscious “Forbidden” sign to modify dangerous behavior, you’d still be around to give away the bride, watch the Super Bowl, or engage in that harmless mischief that puts smiles on faces and separates homo sapiens from a vast evolutionary assortment of biped, quadruped, finned, and slithering creatures who, while knowing no better, perhaps live fuller lives. Gut a lowly lizard on the evolutionary scale, and you’ll find cardiac machinery similar to your own, minus the plaqued arteries, scarred endocardium, and enlarged cardiac chambers. Plumbers in white may be able to intervene on your cracked chest, but wouldn’t an ounce of prevention have preempted painful coronary bypass surgery, polyethylene tubes running into places you never thought existed, an apothecary’s delight as you fork out the thousands of dollars necessary to keep a sinking heart afloat, and the charade attached to the “I feel better than ever,” when the grim realization sets in that your thoracic “little engine that could,” cannot?
You’ve heard the drill before, that keeping your weight down, increasing physical activity, banning those nightly excursions to the neighborhood Seven Eleven for smokes, and taming your high blood pressure and cholesterol will assuredly add years and quality to your life. Now, however, come the scare tactics. Each year about 1.1 million Americans suffer heart attacks, and, sadly to say, 500,000 do not survive them. Let’s keep this train of thought going. While twenty-five percent of Americans over age 50 have at least two risk factors for heart attack, such as high blood pressure, increased cholesterol, or elevated blood sugar, only 10 percent of all Americans have all risk factors under control. The stark mismatch, reality of the matter, and increasing body count have not bred behavior modification. This is especially troubling when the medical literature has provided a “silver lining,” and, namely, that while a 50-year-old man with no risk factors has only a 5 percent chance over the next 45 years of ever having a heart attack, just one risk factor increases the likelihood of a family visit to the undertaker to 50 percent. Women should not be left out of the equation either, as their chances of having a heart attack over the same time period increase from 8 to 38 percent, depending on the presence of none or just one risk factor, respectively. Numbers are numbers, however, and human nature precludes teaching “an old dog new tricks.” It takes a leap of faith to practice what is preached here.
So, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to finally heed a message that you know to be true, or are you going to continue to play dumb? The platitude that, “I know this is bad for me, but I don’t want to live forever,” just doesn’t cut it here, especially when the Grim Reaper may not come for you, but instead leave you physically maimed and a financial and emotional burden to your family. You need to shoot for still more, easy to remember and attain, numbers, instead of shooting yourself in the foot, or worse. So-called bad cholesterol, or LDL cholesterol, should be kept under 100, blood pressure below 120/80, and blood sugar after fasting between 70 and 130. Then, again, you knew that! Losing weight will make those numbers more “palatable,” and kicking the “cancer stick” or cigarette habit will undoubtedly lower your blood pressure, raise the level of HDL (good) cholesterol, and reverse or halt the damage already done to your blood vessels. Even if you’ve been smoking for years, kicking cigarettes to the curb will help your heart. Studies have shown that smoking cessation not only cuts heart attack risk by half within one year, but also nearly reduces it to the level of a nonsmoker within 15 years. Add 30 minutes of moderate exercise, such as brisk walking, most days of the week to the mix, and you have a prescription for a new lease on life that will promote healthy heart function, while at the same time cutting those high financial costs of blood protein CRP tests, heart scans, and drugs to drive down cholesterol. Laboratories, drug companies, and morticians will hate you for it, but they certainly won’t go hungry without your business.
Taking to heart this message from the heart may mend a broken heart in more ways than one!
ã 2010, Albert M. Balesh, M.D. All rights reserved.
posted by Dr. Al at
2/21/2010 08:13:00 AM
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