October 8, 2014 – Avoiding Heart Attack

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Anchor lead:  Four simple strategies can reduce your risk of heart attack, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Not smoking, eating a healthy diet, keeping a healthy weight, and exercising are the keys to avoiding heart attack and stroke, yet another study has confirmed.  Micheal Blaha, a preventive cardiologist at Johns Hopkins, applauds the study.

Blaha: I think this study is really important.  It really finds about the same things our study did. Which is that the adoption of four healthy lifestyle behaviors as early in life as possible, sustaining a healthy diet, exercise, not smoking and maintaining a healthy weight can largely eliminate heart attacks and strokes.  The key here is that this is a disease of lifestyle, and if we adopt lifestyles early in life and sustain them, most of the heart attack and stroke risk goes away.  First things first is smoking.  You have to quit smoking.  Then after that exercise comes out as really important.   :32

Blaha says that like so many things in medicine, prevention is much easier and has greater impact than treatment, so he encourages everyone to adopt these strategies.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.