High Colesterol Risk Factors - Health Channel

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High Colesterol Risk Factors, Health Channel

High blood pressure, pre-diabetes, obesity, sedentary lifestyle, being overweight, family history and age are high cholesterol risk factors.

“Family history and age are non-modifiable risks that have an incredible impact, because as we get older or we have a bad family history, it becomes even more important to pay attention to the modifiable risks like high cholesterol, high blood sugar and high blood pressure,” says Dr. Ted Feldman, Medical Director of Prevention and Community Health with Miami Cardiac & Vascular Institute.

Transcript

High Colesterol Risk Factors, Health Channel

What risk factors?, I think we have a graphic here, if we can take that, and you can walk us through some cholesterol risk factors, that we should be on the lookout for. Sure, well obviously cholesterol is that which is circulating in the bloodstream, and is impacted and accelerated in terms of plaque buildup when the person with high cholesterol has other risk factors like high blood pressure which we’re going to talk about, pre-diabetes which is just the state that occurs between normal blood sugar levels, and diabetic levels, obesity and a sedentary lifestyle, clearly increase your metabolic risks, and the risk of developing natheless chlorosis, and certainly people ask me all the time, doctor what’s the single most important thing I can do to prevent myself in getting a heart attack at a young age?, and the answer is stay young and pick your parents very very carefully, so family history and age are really unfortunately non-modifiable rests that have an incredibly important impact, because as we get older, and based upon our genetic code, we really are the two non-modifiable risk factors that most impact on our risk, so as we get older, or we have a bad family history, it becomes even more important to pay attention to the modifiable risks like high cholesterol ,high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.> So in that list if you have maybe more than one, two, three, will that even increase your chances even more?.>There’s something called an exponential curve, so 1+1 doesn’t equal 2, so if you have high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, your risk doesn’t go from two fold to four fold which would be double, but it goes from two full to about eight fold, which is that as we remember from high school math, an exponential increase, if you have three risk factors it’s not one plus one plus one equal three, but it could be an eight to 16 fold increase, so the more risk factors you have, the more likely you are to develop a coronary heart disease, and certainly the worst risk factor of all, is cigarette smoking so if you’re a smoker and you can’t stop, it even becomes more important to get your blood pressure blood sugar and cholesterol under control.

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