A few tests can keep tabs on your cardiac health

By Patricia Hagen
Gannett News Service

To determine your risk of heart disease, the No. 1 killer of Americans, you need to know your numbers and letters.

Start with BMI, LDL and HDL. Then there's BP. And what about CRP?

The issue of heart health requires you to navigate a confusing alphabet soup of tests.

So here's a cheat sheet compiled with help from cardiologists. If you want to protect your health, or lower your risk of heart trouble, you need to be familiar with these tests:

• Body mass index, or some other measure of overweight and obesity.
• Blood pressure, a measure of how efficiently your heart is pumping. It's been in the news lately because of recent changes in guidelines for identifying people at risk for hypertension.
• Cholesterol levels, including HDL (high-density lipoprotein, the good kind) and LDL (low-density lipoprotein, the bad kind), to determine how much fatty gunk is collecting in your blood vessels.
• Blood sugar, which tells if you're in danger of developing type 2 diabetes, a disease that damages your circulatory system.

Once your numbers are determined by screening tests, it's important to discuss them with your doctor, cardiologists Mary Walsh, Michael Venturini and Umesh Khot say.

"It's not just numbers. It's numbers in context with your age and other risk factors. Every patient is unique," says Venturini, chief medical officer of the Indiana Heart Hospital.

In addition to test results, doctors also will consider your gender, health history and family health history — and your smoking, eating and exercise habits.

Cardiovascular disease kills almost 1 million Americans each year.

The more risk factors you have, the more carefully your physicians will monitor you. Depending on the numbers, the doctor may recommend tests, medications and lifestyle changes.

In some cases, doctors are ordering a blood test to measure CRP, short for C-reactive protein. The test measures inflammation in the body, which can be a predictor of heart attacks and strokes.

Venturini says he uses the relatively new test when he wants more information to help him decide how to medically treat a patient.

In many cases, patients get a prescription for more exercise and weight loss. These lifestyle changes can help keep numbers in the desirable range or significantly reduce too-high levels of LDL cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar.

"Daily exercise and attention to diet" are keys to cardiovascular health, says Walsh, director of preventive cardiology for the Care Group.

Medications are helpful in many cases, but you can't expect pills to solve your health problems, she says. You need to change your habits to change your numbers.

Walsh likes to look at numbers not included in the list above. She wishes more people would try to achieve the goal of taking 10,000 footsteps a day.

While that's a benchmark for fitness, any increase in walking or other physical activities will help your heart, she says. Walsh recommends using a pedometer, an inexpensive gadget that clips to your waistband, to count steps.

Zero is the number Khot recommends for cigarettes. Over time, smoking causes blood vessels to narrow and increases the risk of a heart attack or stroke.

Too many people assume they're destined for heart trouble because of their family history, says Khot, of Indiana Heart Physicians and St. Francis Hospitals.

But it's wrong to think, "If it's in your family, it's no longer in your control," he says. Khot's research shows that family history has both nature (genetic) and nurture (environmental) components that need to be considered.

Some families pass on bad habits lime smoking or poor diet, but you can do something about that and reduce your risk of heart disease and diabetes by more than 60 percent. That level of improvement, Khot said, is "bigger than any medication we have."