Heart Health Archive

Add strength training to your home workout to boost your cardiovascular fitness.

With age, much of your body's muscle is replaced by fat. By age 75, lean muscle mass drops to just a quarter of your total weight, down from 50% in the young adult years. Some of the effects of this loss are clearly visible — your body changes shape, and you can no longer hoist heavy boxes or sprint to catch a bus. But this shift also carries broader implications for your overall health and chronic disease risk.

Your heart will thank you

Five of the modifiable risk factors for cardiovascular disease — inactivity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, excess body fat, and diabetes — respond in varying degrees to strength training, says Elissa Huber-Anderson, a physical therapist at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. "Strength exercises increase muscle mass and burn body fat, thus reducing the risk for obesity. This type of workout also helps manage type 2 diabetes by decreasing abdominal fat and improving blood sugar control," she says. Strength training may also improve blood cholesterol levels and reduce resting blood pressure, which further lowers the risk to your heart.

A rapid heartbeat can be frightening, but this often-fleeting problem is usually harmless.

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If you're exercising or feeling very nervous, you expect your heart to beat faster than normal. But what if your heart sometimes starts racing out of the blue, for no apparent reason? You might have supraventricular tachycardia, or SVT. SVT is an umbrella term that covers several different types of rapid heart rhythms, all of which are caused by an electrical glitch in the upper part of the heart.

The most common SVTs are atrial fibrillation — a rapid, chaotic rhythm that increases the chance of having a stroke—and atrial flutter, a fast but usually regular heartbeat. But when cardiologists talk about SVT, they're usually referring to three different, less-common conditions (see "What is supraventricular tachycardia?").

Research we're watching

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If you're craving a crunchy snack, a handful of cashews is a heart-healthy choice, a small study suggests.

Although they're a popular pick in nut mixes, cashews have a bit of a bad rap. Because cashews contain about 20% saturated fat, the FDA omitted them from the qualified health claim suggesting that nuts may lower heart disease risk when eaten as part of a diet low in saturated fats and cholesterol.

Research we're watching

The more physically active you are, the lower your risk of high blood pressure, a study in the April 2017 issue of Hypertension suggests.

Researchers pooled data from 29 studies involving a total of more than 330,000 people, about 20% of whom had high blood pressure. They examined the association between high blood pressure and leisure-time physical activity (walking, dancing, or gardening, for example) as measured by metabolic equivalents (METs).

Research we're watching

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Spinach, like all green vegetables, is full of nutrients that may help prevent heart disease. But one day, this leafy green may also provide a novel way to repair a damaged heart, as described in the May 2017 issue of Biomaterials.

A team of researchers used detergent to dissolve the cells inside a spinach leaf, leaving only the scaffolding of the leaf veins (which resemble blood vessels in the heart). Next, they seeded those veins with human heart stem cells. After five days, the cells spontaneously began to contract — and continued to beat for three weeks.

The average American consumes three times the recommended daily intake of sodium, largely because of salt added to processed and prepared foods. It’s possible to reduce daily sodium intake, but it does require effort and vigilance.

Those extra inches around the middle may signal increased fat around abdominal organs and rising health risks.

It's a rare woman over age 50 who has the same waist measurement she had as a teenager. But in the past decade or so, women's waistlines have been expanding regardless of age. A 2014 report from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that from 1999 to 2012, the average body mass index (BMI) for women age 20 or older held steady. But during the same period, the average female waistline grew slowly and steadily, from 36.2 inches to 37.8 inches. Researchers are still searching for an explanation for this phenomenon, but they do know one thing: increasing waistlines are linked to greater risks for heart disease, diabetes, and osteoporosis.

What's in a waistline?

Regardless of whether your weight has changed over the years, your height is likely to have decreased, the result of declining volume in the intervertebral discs of the spine. As your torso shortens, your abdominal organs have less vertical space to inhabit, so they move horizontally. If you haven't gained weight, an increase of an inch or two around the waist may simply reflect lost height.

Treating heart disease is expensive. Adopting heart-healthy habits can save money as well as lives.

If you exercise, eat right, and follow other heart-friendly habits, you're probably less likely to end up in the hospital with a heart problem. And — no surprise here — that translates to far lower health care costs. The average hospital charge for a heart operation or related procedure is about $85,000 (see "The price of treating heart disease").

A recent report shed light on the magnitude of the savings realized from heart disease prevention strategies. The study, published in the Feb. 1, 2017, Journal of the American Heart Association, focused on Medicare claims for more than 6,200 people over age 65. Health care costs were about $5,000 less per year in people with the most heart-healthy factors compared with those with the least number of factors. If all Medicare beneficiaries followed five of seven key heart-healthy habits (see "Life's Simple 7") to reduce cardiovascular disease, it would save more than $41 billion a year in Medicare costs, the study authors estimated.