How to keep track of your heart health and reduce the risk of heart disease?
To take proper care of your heart, you need to know more about the factors that affect heart health. Some of the top risk factors for cardiac disease are a family history of heart disease, high blood pressure, cholesterol levels, diabetes, obesity, lack of exercise, and poor dietary choices. We cannot control hereditary factors, but we can try to understand them and take proactive action accordingly.
Knowing your family health history of heart disease and related conditions is one of the first steps you can take to prevent heart disease and heart attacks in the future. Your risk of heart disease, heart attack, and stroke is higher if your father, mother, brother, or sister had a heart attack before the age of 50. Having such a family history not only increases your risk of heart disease, but also increases your risk of the factors that lead to heart disease.
How can a DNA test help prevent heart disease?
A simple DNA test can give you inside information on how your unique DNA profile affects your risk for conditions like obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. There was a time when such a DNA test was highly expensive and had to be performed in a laboratory setting. But today, you can easily get insights on your risk for heart disease with an affordable at-home DNA test.
Taking a DNA test and making smarter lifestyle choices on the basis of the test results can help you reduce your risk of cardiac disease. These lifestyle changes can include getting more exercise, drinking more water, adding more fiber to your diet, reducing stress with techniques like meditation, losing excess weight, and reducing sugar and other processed foods.
A DNA test can reveal food sensitivities, specific requirements for vitamins and minerals, and can indicate which workouts can work best for optimal fitness, based on your genetic profile. It can tell you more about your sleep patterns, sensitivities to food, your brain health, metabolism, risk of sports injuries, and even skin health.
If a preventive genetic test can help you identify disease risks and prompt you to take proactive action for better heart health, it just could be the smartest choice you ever make.
