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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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Is Your Heart Older Than Your Age? Each day, our heart beats about 100,000 times and it pumps about 23,000 liters (or 5,000 gallons) of blood around our body. In order to function properly, our heart requires an electrical supply, which is provided by a special group of heart cells called the sinus node that is also known as our heart’s natural pacemaker. Heart is the most important organ in our body because life ends the moment heart stops beating. But, it seems that many people do not take their heart health seriously. Cardiovascular disease (includes heart disease and stroke) has been one of the leading causes of deaths globally. In 2006, about 630,000 Americans died of heart disease, which accounted for 26 percent of total death, according to the American Heart Foundation (AHF). In Singapore, heart disease and stroke were crowned as the top killer in 2008, accounted for approximately 32 percent of total deaths, based on the statistics from the Ministry of Health. During natural ageing process, our heart would age at the same rate as our other organs. Nevertheless, some factors such as diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, overweight and smoking could simply raise our risk of getting heart disease.
Now, here comes the question: “How can we measure our heart’s age?” There are lots of online health tools available. Most of them are created and publicized by some medical charities while others might be marketing devices created to help companies sell more of their health products or services. One of the online tools that can help measure a person's "heart age" is known as “Floral Heart Age Calculator”. Unilever, a food company, and the World Heart Federation create the tool. The Heart Age Calculator can be accessed at www.heartagecalculator.com. Based on 40 years of heart health research models, it uses standard heart disease and stroke risk factors to estimate the "age" of a person's heart. It helps a person determine his or her risk of developing cardiovascular diseases over the next decade. Unilever hopes to motivate 100 million people to take the Heart Age test using the Calculator to lower elevated heart age by 2020. The calculator, however, is not suitable for people with a pre-existing heart problem. This is because the risk models on which it is based were developed to estimate risk of a “first” cardiovascular event. By the way, those risk models had been published in the cardiology journal “Circulation” in January 2008. Depending on the risk factors, a person’s heart age can be higher or lower than the actual age. For example, if one is 40 years old and the heart’s age is 50, this means that he or she has increased risk factors for heart disease over the next 10 years, and he or she must do something to reduce these risk factors. The ideal case is, of course, the heart age to be lower or at least the same age as your birth age. Even if the heart age is calculated to be higher than the birth age, one should not be overly alarmed. He or she can turn back the clock by making some simple lifestyle changes like adopting more healthier diet and starting exercise regularly. The team responsible for the Calculator is continuously updating the tool when new data become available and based on public responses to improve its efficacy over time. Nevertheless, one should remember that the Heart Age is not a diagnostic tool but is one that will help people think about their own heart health and motivate continuous efforts to reduce cardiovascular risk factors.
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