What’s Your Heart Age?

February is Heart Month here in Canada and heart disease continues to be one of the leading causes of death.  Did you know that your heart may be aging faster than you are?  And that knowing the cardiovascular age of your heart will lead to better heart health management? Factors that can influence your heart age include your blood pressure levels, cholesterol and other risk factors such as smoking.

Knowledge is power when it comes to heart health, and for that reason the Canadian Cardiovascular Society recommends Canadians calculate their cardiovascular age and know their risk profile to improve management of blood pressure and blood lipids.  It should come as no surprise that studies show that understanding and knowing the cardiovascular age of our heart leads to better health management as it’s so much easier to manage a potential problem when we know it is there!

To help us calculate our heart age, Shoppers Drug Mart now has a Heart Age Calculator on their website!  The calculator is an online tool that can help us Canadians calculate our cardiovascular age and assess our risk of heart attack, stroke or cardiovascular disease over the next 10 years.  The calculator uses simple lifestyle questions (like height, age, weight, blood pressure, activity level, family history, etc.) to help determine the “age” of your heart.  It is the only online scientifically validated tool available that provides a personalized heart age and cardiovascular risk profile as recommended by the Canadian Cardiovascular Society Guidelines.

I completed the Heart Age Calculator myself, and was happy to see that my heart age was determined to be 5 years younger than my actual age!  Yay for exercising regularly and not smoking!

As you guys know, last year I suffered from overtraining syndrome from teaching too many fitness classes, which among other things left me with heart palpitations.  Since then I’ve had to make some big changes in the type and number of classes I teach and my mindset towards working as a fitness professional.  It took a long time for the heart palpitations to go away, and occasionally return if I am working myself too hard without enough rest.  

As frightening as heart palpitations are, they are nothing compared to what J dealt with the past few years.  He kept having these scary “attacks” that the doctors brushed off as panic attacks (even though we knew and pleaded with them to look for something else).  It wasn’t until this past summer when I had to take him to the ER one afternoon that they discovered his heart was going into a-fib and he had a super right heart rate.  They ended up shocking his heart back into rhythm.  About a month later it happened again, this time he couldn’t even stand up and I had to call 911 for an ambulance.  They shocked him again, while he was fully awake and I was standing right there.  It was super scary.

Many tests and appointments later we discovered he had a short circuit in his heart which caused it to go over 300 beats/minute when he had these “episodes”.  Without going into details, he had to go in for testing which involved putting catheters into each chamber of his heart and then trying to duplicate the “episode” to find out where it was originating.  J was awake, and the testing took hours (about 5).  They finally found an extra circuit and ablated it (which he tells me made him feel like his heart was on fire).  The whole day was scary, but these procedures have a really high success rate so hopefully he’ll never have those problems again.

Needless to say, heart health and taking care of your heart is a big deal to me.  I know how important it is to take care of your heart because you never really know what life is going to throw at you, and the better condition you are in when something happens, the better your chances are of surviving!

Somethings you can do right now to be heart healthy include:

– Stop smoking

– Monitor your blood pressure

– Live and active lifestyle

– Regulate Cholesterol Levels

– Take Control

February is heart month, and it’s time to get Heart Healthy and encourage all Canadians to do the same!  Let’s all start taking serious care of our hearts by taking the Heart Age Calculator test.  I’ve done it, I’ve asked my loved ones to do it and now you can too!

Visit the Shoppers Drug Mart website and use the Heart Age Calculator today and find out what your heart age is, and then forward the link to your family and friends to help them become informed about their cardiovascular age as well!

What’s your heart age?

Once you complete the Heart Age Calculator I’d love to hear about your results!  Is your heart younger, older or the same age as the rest of you?  Now that you have these results what (if anything) do you plan to do to take care of your heart?

Disclosure – Although this post has been sponsored by Shoppers Drug Mart Inc., the opinions and language are all my own, and in no way do they reflect the views, opinions or positions of Shoppers Drug Mart Inc. or its affiliates or licensees. Shoppers Drug Mart Inc. makes no representation as to accuracy, completeness, suitability or validity of any information within this blog post and will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information or for any losses, injuries or damages arising from its display or use.