Medical Center Tips

Hello.  Paul Zollinger Read.  I'm the Chief Medical Officer at Bupa and I want to talk to you today about heart disease.  Specifically, how to prevent heart disease. Now, your heart is a muscle.  And just like any other muscle it needs a supply of oxygen rich blood to work properly.  It receives its own blood supply through the coronary arteries and their branches which lie on the surface of the heart. What happens in heart disease is they silt up.  They get these things called plaques in them.  Now if they generally silt up, then people can get what's called angina, chest pain which typically comes on when they walk up a hill or they eat. But occasionally you can get narrowing's that then burst.  Those plaques rupture.  And then an artery gets blocked and you have a heart attack.  But what are the things that create and cause and aggravate heart disease? And if we look at them in turn, smoking is probably one of the most significant factors.  Absolutely no doubt about that.  In fact, when the smoking ban was brought in, in public places, we saw a really significant fall in the incidence of heart attacks.  And that happened within six to nine months.  So we know, smoking causes heart disease and can precipitate heart attacks.  The next one is blood pressure.  The tricky thing about blood pressure is you don't know you've got it.  So, it's a really good idea to get your blood pressure checked.  It's easy to do and now, more and more people are doing it themselves.  The other is blood sugar, diabetes.  If you have diabetes, you are at much greater risk of heart disease.  And the most important thing there is that you really focus hard and keep your blood sugar under control.  You follow your doctor's advice, you take the medications or if you're on diet, you stick to that diet. It's rare for people to be put on treatment for cholesterol if they don't have a family history.  But it's not unheard of.  Because if your cholesterol has a lot of bad and verylittle good, your doctor might decide to put you on cholesterol lowering tablets known as statins.  Then we look at diet itself.  Now those plaques I talked about are formed by cholesterol.  And cholesterol, there are many types but essentially there's what we call a good type which is called HDL and there's a bad type,LDL.  So, when you get your cholesterol tested, it's important to know how much good you've got because good reduces heart disease and how much bad you've got. Exercise is crucial and it's interesting isn't it because you think of exercise as oh, I'm losing weight but actually that's not the mechanism.  So when I exercise I know my good cholesterol goes up and my bad cholesterol goes down.  And what we've found out is, it actually has a big anti-inflammatory affect.  So these little plaques are inflamed and you exercising reduces that inflammation.  Now you don't need to do a great deal.  Three or four times a week, 15 to 30 minutes, brisk walking.  You don't need to be a marathon runner. The other thing is alcohol.  Now, we all know alcohol is bad for you in large quantities but there's no doubt that one or two units a day is good for heart disease.  It has a positive effect on reducing heart disease.  So, there's lots you can do to prevent heart disease.  If you're at all concerned, go and see your doctor and get those tests done. And if you've got a family history, really take it seriously.