Is your heart older than you? A new on-line tool from Texas Health Resources calculates your heart age, and your ten-year risk for cardiovascular disease. "It gives you an idea of where you stand as far as disease progression and risk, and so if your risk is higher than what your age is," says Amir Choudhry, MD, a cardiologist on the medical staff at Texas Heath Presbyterian Hospital Plano. "It's time to make some changes, and it's a wake-up call." "It's basically a diagnostic that you're running on yourself just like when you go to the car mechanic, so it will give you an age for your heart, it will give you an actual number, so say you're 45 and it's saying you're 55, then maybe we need to work on something." Even if you think of yourself as healthy, the free profiler provides information you can share with your doctor to prioritize and reduce risks. "So it's a good way of kind of mapping where you are and what you should do to take care of your risk factors," Choudhry say! s. "What I tell my patients often is I want you to think of heart disease as a house, it's a house you don't want built. Each one of those risk factors is a wall, and do your best to keep that wall from going up cause when the roof goes up, you're in my emergency room." Exercise and eating right are just a few of the ways you can reduce your risk of heart disease. The profiler and your physician can suggest others. "It's perfect. It's giving you actual numbers. It's not just me saying that you're in ...
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