Tag : cardiac

How fast your heart beats may predict how long you live. There are a lot of fancy and expensive medical tests that can be done to determine your risk for heart disease, stroke, and premature death. But there’s one test that you can actually do at home sitting on your couch that costs nothing, takes about one minute, and will give you a pretty good idea of your risk.

Here’s how you do the test. Sit quietly and rest for 15 minutes. Then find your pulse in your wrist or your neck and count the beats for one minute. If your resting heart rate is more than 84 bpm, your overall risk of cardiovascular disease goes up by about 40%. And the odds are you will live about a year and a half less than others your age.

But if you will lose your excess fat and start exercising, your heart rate should slow, and your risk should return to normal.

Thanks to modern medical advances, there are an almost unlimited number of tests doctors can administer to determine who is at the greatest risk of heart attacks, strokes and dementia. Take the simple cholesterol test, for example: today we doctors can subdivide your cholesterol into seven or eight or even nine smaller subtypes and analyze your risk of cardiovascular disease, even if you appear to have “low” or “normal” cholesterol. Physicians today can administer a battery of expensive tests for just about everything.

I recently read some exciting news in a study published in the authoritative British medical journal Lancet. This study gives us further hope that the goal of repairing heart muscle damaged in a heart attack is becoming ever more realistic.

We have known for some time that stem cells (biological cells that divide, diversify and self-renew) are important to helping patients recover from muscle injury resulting from heart attacks. If we can improve the conditions that increase stem cell production in these patients, we can improve their recovery. There are several ways to boost stem cell production. For example, there are tiny, specialized protein molecules called “myokines” which are produced by muscle; these molecules increase the body’s production of stem cells and promote healing from virtually every injury. The more muscle you have, and the more that muscle is exercised, the more myokines you produce and the better you heal. (Increased myokine