Cardiovascular disease is the most common cause of death in the United States, and includes coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease (stroke), hypertension, and peripheral vascular disease (claudication of the legs).
An estimated 6 million people in the US have coronary heart disease, 2 million have cerebrovascular disease, and 58 million people have hypertension. The American Heart Association estimates that 63,290,000 people in the US have cardiovascular disease. So, nobody out there can say that they either do not suffer with it themselves, or that they do not nobody somebody directly who deals with this disease.
The chance of an American male developing coronary artery disease before age 60 is one in 5.
The American Heart Association estimates that 4,740,000 Americans alive today have a history of a heart attack, angina (chest pain), or both.
The even scarier statistic: Sudden death is the presenting symptom in 1 out of every 5 coronary attacks.
I could go on and on with statistics. For many of us, it is really not thought about until it affects either someone close to us, such as family, friends, or even ourselves, before we get the wake up call. There are many risk factors that go into this as well, some of which we can control, and others we cannot. These can range from our age/sex; smoking history; cholesterol levels; race; family history; obesity; hypertension itself; diabetes. We have to be able to control the factors that we can as much as possible. We need to be starting now, not after an event happens.
As I go forward on this topic, I will talk about what things can be done to test and evaluate for some of these problems, and what we can do to try and change our risk factors going forward. For a lot of these risk factors, we are “the drivers in control”. The more we know about our individual risk factors, the more we can do to change them, or at least improve our odds.
Keep moving everybody!
Dr. Dan
Consecutive Exercise Day #: 1708
