As both the center of your circulatory system and overall one of the most vital organs in your body, your heart is the ultimate workhorse, beating an estimated 100,00 times daily, which amounts to 2.5 billion hearts over your entire life. It’s crucial to your blood circulating throughout your veins, arteries, and blood vessels in a staggering 20 seconds.
Many diseases affect heart health, and several factors can lead to their development. With heart disease being the leading cause of death across cultures and races, we need to know how to take better care of it.
During American Heart Month this February, let's look at some essential ways to keep this organ and the cardiovascular system as healthy as possible for as long as we can. Melanchton A. Mangoba, MD, and his experienced medical staff can help the Riverside, California, community stay heart-healthy with many preventive tips and medical options to help them live a long life.
The term cardiovascular disease describes a range of illnesses that affect one or more parts of your heart and blood vessels. Several problems can lead to heart issues, including:
Cardiovascular diseases can present with symptoms or show no signs at all.
The effects vary with the severity and location of heart issues, presenting a range of symptoms:
This illness causes jaw, neck, back, or upper belly pain; chest pain, tightness, discomfort, or pressure (angina); and numbness, weakness, and coldness in your legs.
People with this problem often experience chest pain, dizziness, fainting, chest fluttering, lightheadedness, slow heartbeat, and shortness of breath.
This leads to blue or gray skin, swelling in your belly, legs, or around your eyes, and shortness of breath and poor weight gain in infants.
This affects the heart’s muscles and leads to fatigue, shortness of breath, rapid heartbeat, swollen ankles, legs, and feet, fainting, dizziness, and lightheadedness.
We can help manage medical conditions that affect your heart, but there are many things you can do to keep it healthy:
What you eat affects many parts of the body, and doing things like lowering sodium intake, reducing saturated fat intake, and increasing intake of fruits, vegetables, and dietary fiber is good for your heart.
In the age of remote work and increased media entertainment, getting up and exercising is more important than ever for your heart. Get out of your chair, and get in more walking, running, and other forms of exercise to keep the heart pumping.
Smoking is unhealthy for you in nearly every way, and stopping it helps your heart health. Reducing the amount of alcohol you drink also helps in this regard.
Many conditions not directly related to your heart can damage it over time, including diabetes and kidney disease. Keep these issues under control to improve heart function.
Obesity puts a major burden on the body in many ways, including increasing the risk of heart problems. Losing weight helps your body in so many ways, so work toward a healthy weight to keep going.
There are so many ways to take care of your heart, and this is just scratching the surface. For more tips and other ways to improve heart health, make an appointment online or by phone with Dr. Mangoba and his team today.
