The basics: Your guide to a healthy heart
Last reviewed: March 2011
This guide provides comprehensive advice on how to have a healthy heart.
At the top of the page you'll see three tabs: The Basics, Ratings, and Tools & Downloads.
The Basics: This is where you'll find our advice on preventing, diagnosing, and treating heart disease.
- In Prevention we describe the screening tests you need and how to have a healthy heart by, for example, lowering your blood pressure, controlling high cholesterol levels, losing excess weight, quitting smoking, exercising, and taking low dose-aspirin.
- In Symptoms and diagnosis we describe the signs of a heart attack, heart disease, and heart failure, and the tests you need to diagnose problems.
- In Treatment we describe how people are often rushed into invasive procedures they don’t need, particularly angioplasty. We also explain when lifestyle changes and drugs are sufficient, and when bypass surgery might be required.
Ratings: This is where we provide our Ratings of heart screening tests, identifying those you need and those you don't.
Tools & Downloads: Here you'll find a calculator that estimates your risk of having a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years, as well as downloads of our Best Buy Drug Reports on various heart drugs.
This project was made possible in part by a grant from the New York State Attorney General on behalf of Attorneys General
of all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, from litigation-settlement funds to benefit the health-care needs
of consumers with high blood pressure and angina.
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Prevention
Prevention
