Written By: Debjani Arora | Updated : October 21, 2014 4:53 PM IST
If you thought that you are likely to get a heart attack because your father or grandfather had got one, you can put your fears to rest now. A new study has pointed out that your lifestyle choices and environment decides whether you will have a heart attack or not. Your genes aren t responsible for the same. The research has also found that heart attacks are not as connected to family history and genetics as may have been previously believed.
The probable cause of the attack
This new study is like a ray of hope for people with heart diseases and family history of coronary disease diagnosed with narrow coronaries might realize that heart attack is not inevitable. Because coronary disease and heart attacks are so closely related, researchers in the past have assumed they're the same thing, said Benjamin Horne from the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Salt Lake City, US. They thought that if someone had coronary disease, they would eventually have a heart attack. This finding may help people realise that, through their choices, they have greater control over whether they ultimately have a heart attack, Horne added.
The researchers studied patients with different severities of coronary disease who had or had not suffered a heart attack. The patients were identified by linking 700,000 patients in Intermountain Healthcare's clinical data warehouse with the Intermountain Genealogy Registry, which contains 23 million individuals within extended family pedigrees.
While severe coronary artery disease can be inherited, the presence of heart attacks in people with less severe coronary disease was not clustered in families, the findings showed. The findings were presented at the 2014 conference of the American Society of Human Genetics in San Diego.
Here are a few things that could increase your risk of a heart attack
Smoking incessantly
You might have heard it numerous times that smoking can kill and among other things it can lead to a heart attack. According to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), smoking increases the chance of suffering from a coronary heart disease two to four times by reducing blood circulation due to narrowed arteries. Scarily, 92 million out of India s 285 million smokers don t even know that it s bad for their heart. Moreover, according to statistics second hand smoke kills 6 lakh people every year out of which 1 lakh are children and 87% of deaths due to second-hand smoke are due to cardiovascular diseases.
Drinking alcohol, albeit moderately
Numerous studies have found that people, who drink moderately (330ml beer or 60 ml hard liquor whiskey, vodka, etc. and 100 ml wine) actually have better cardiovascular health than people who completely abstain from alcohol or people who tend to drink too much. What is not debatable is the fact that excessive drinking is tied to various cardiovascular issues like obesity, high blood pressure and increased risk to coronary artery disease. Binge drinking (drinking excessively in a short amount of time) is linked to poor cardiovascular health and increase chances of a heart attack.
Lack of exercise
Our current work-office-sedentary lifestyle has played a major part in the rise of cardiovascular diseases around the world. Lack of exercise leads to build-up of bad cholesterol which prevents the blood from flowing freely through the arteries, giving rise to hypertension, heart attacks, etc. Exercising plays a very important role in your cardiovascular health. It facilitates weight loss, lowers blood pressure, increases your good cholesterol level, improves blood circulation and allows your heart to pump more efficiently. In fact, it helps reduce stress also by releasing feel-good hormones called endorphins. Read how exercise can make you heart healthy.
Inadequate sleep
Initially, our body s internal clock was adapted to the natural day-light schedule and exposure to artificial light, especially while night has thrown it off-track. This has also led to various kinds of sleep disorders which in turn impacts our appetite causing obesity, glucose metabolism and increase in blood pressure. This also increases the incidence of heart attack with time. It s a vicious cycle, therefore getting enough sleep is very important to keep heart disease at bay. Read do your heart a favour, get some sleep!
Intake of saturated and trans-fats
They are two kinds of fats saturated and unsaturated. Saturated fats are present in food items like butter, red meat, dairy products, chocolates, etc. and are known to raise LDL or bad cholesterol levels, and most dieticians recommend limiting their intake. Trans-fats are unsaturated fats that have the same effect. Packaged and unprocessed food items usually contain a lot of trans-fats and that s why nutritionists suggest avoiding them as they can put a strain on your heart health and lead to various kinds of heart diseases increasing your chance of heart attack. Here are other reasons that could lead to a heart attack.
With inputs from IANS
Image courtesy: Getty Images
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