Heart Health Archive

Targeted screening and improved repair techniques may minimize the danger of this uncommon condition.

With a diameter roughly the size of a garden hose, the aorta is the body's largest artery. It curves out of the heart through the chest, passing straight down the center of the body before dividing into the arteries that serve the legs (see illustration).

NSAID users: Take the lowest effective dose for the shortest possible time.

If you have heart disease, national guidelines recommend that you take a low-dose (81-mg) aspirin every day. It's an inexpensive and effective way to lower your risk of a heart attack or stroke. According to a report in the July 17 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, about seven in 10 adults with heart disease follow this advice.

The study relied on telephone surveys done by the CDC about health behaviors. It included data from more than 17,900 adults from 20 states and the District of Columbia.

Boosting your fitness level may help decrease the symptoms of the most common heart rhythm disorder, according to a study published online June 22 by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The disorder—atrial fibrillation, or afib—causes an irregular, rapid heartbeat that can lead to shortness of breath, dizziness, and fainting.

The study included 308 people with afib who were also overweight or obese, a condition that raises the risk of afib. The participants answered questions about their afib symptoms and underwent tests to determine their fitness levels, which were described in metabolic equivalents, or METs. (METs measure your level of exertion and are based on how much oxy-gen your body uses during activities; sitting still is 1 MET, and brisk walking is 3.)

For years, experts recommended low-fat diets as a way to lower cholesterol and heart disease risk. Today, we know that low-fat isn't the way to go after all. A healthy diet includes plenty of "good-for-you" fats — and limits the unhealthy ones.  Current dietary guidelines recommend that you get 20% to 35% of your daily calories from fat. Even more may be fine, if you follow these simple guidelines.

Favor the "good" fats.

The best sources of healthy fats are oily, cold-water fish, such as salmon and tuna; plant sources such as avocados and nuts; and vegetable oils, such as olive, canola, soybean, and cottonseed oils. These fats promote heart health because they lower cholesterol levels — and they may even fight chronic inflammation, which may contribute to heart disease. It's okay to get up to 35% of your daily calories from fat — as long as most of it comes from sources like these.

It helps build cardiovascular fitness with shorter workouts.

Have you heard about interval training but aren't sure how it works and whether it's right for you? Interval training simply means alternating between short bursts of intense exercise and brief periods of rest (or a different, less-intense activity). The payoff is improved cardiovascular fitness.

Changing lifelong habits is hard, but these practical tips can help.

When blood pressure persists above healthy limits, men are faced with a decision: take a medication now, or try to lower it with nutrition, exercise, and other lifestyle changes. Many men are reluctant to start taking a new pill every day—possibly for life. Although changing deeply ingrained habits can be hard, it really works.

Training the public how to do CPR saves the lives of people struck by cardiac arrest outside of a hospital, according to a study in The New England Journal of Medicine. The survival boost was markedly higher for men who experienced cardiac arrest outside the home.

In the United States, 420,000 people per year experience cardiac arrest outside of hospitals. It seems like a no-brainer that cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) saves lives, but hard evidence has been lacking on exactly how many lives are saved. To help clarify the issue, researchers in Sweden analyzed more than 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests that occurred from 1990 to 2011. It's a good country to test CPR's power, since a third of the Swedish population knows how to do it.