Eat Healthy

You can significantly reduce your risk for heart disease by focusing on a healthy diet. Grains, fruits, vegetables, and low-fat foods like beans or fish are great options for tasty meals and keeping your heart strong. Avoiding deep-fried foods, packaged snacks, margarines, and any processed products will also decrease your chances of developing the disease. Eating right also allows you to watch your weight in the process, since obesity is another leading cause for heart disease.

Manage Stress

Being stressed out is like the first block in a domino effect. Some suffer from high blood pressure, resort to smoking, get headaches or other pains, lose sleep, or even irregular heart rhythms and damage to your arteries. It’s important to keep a positive attitude and find outlets for your anger or methods to relieve your stress. Chronic stress or episodes of panic can leave your body in highs and lows that take a toll on your heart and blood pressure. Take time to figure out how to manage your situation or environment and remember to get enough sleep!

Exercise

Exercising can provide your body with numerous benefits. Not only can it help you manage that stress, improve your mood, and maintain a healthy weight, but you will make your heart stronger in the process, as well as the rest of your body. Other conditions that put a strain on your heart, like high cholesterol or high blood pressure, can be prevented with as little as 30 minutes of exercise every other day.

Cut Bad Habits

Smoking and abuse of alcohol lead to many harmful consequences, including heart disease. Drinking especially can cause high blood pressure, which is heavily linked to a failing heart. One problem smoking causes is blood clots that obstruct your blood flow through your blood vessels. If you are also taking medications, the substances can interfere with your body and lead to many major problems, including heart disease.

During a stress test, doctors will gather data about how your heart performs when exerted.To increase your heart rate, you will probably be asked to walk on a treadmill, pedal on a stationary bike, or another type of simple exercise. Using a number of monitors, your physician will examine how your heart performs while stressed, checking your blood pressure, heart rate, and other information. This test can help to detect a number of potential issues if an abnormal heart rate or insufficient blood flow to the heart is found. It can also point to malfunctioning heart valves, predict the chances of a coronary disease, and evaluate the effectiveness of heart medications that you may be taking.

While there are several types of stress tests, there are four most commonly used varieties. The treadmill stress test is the simplest to apply and can detect any major issues by simply monitoring how far a patient can walk and whether any pains develop by doing so. A stress echocardiogram (commonly referred to as an “echo”) will actually depict the movement of a patient’s heart, pinpointing any lack of blood flow or other issues through a visualization of the heart’s pumping motion. An Adenosine stress test involves administering a drug to patients who cannot exercise for any number of reasons. The drug will increase the patient’s heart rate as if he or she were exercising, allowing doctors to examine the heart’s reaction under stress. A nuclear stress test uses a radioactive substance and specialized cameras to carefully pinpoint any unhealthy parts of the heart. After the substance is injected into the patient, data will be recorded both while the patient is at rest and after the heart is stimulated through exercise.

The specific conditions for a test and why it’s being conducted vary for every patient. If you’re concerned about an upcoming heart stress test, or think you may need one, consult with your primary doctor or a cardiologist.