A risk factor basically means a condition, characteristic, or behavior that is the reason behind an injury. You do not need to be very intelligent to figure out that the more the number of heart disease risk factors, the more is the probability of you suffering from a heart ailment, especially coronary heart disease.
Cholesterol, Elevated Blood Pressure, and Cigarette Smoking 3 Main Causes
There are many heart disease risk factors that cannot fit into a small space. However, there are three main causes that should be given a lot of importance. You can summarize the three main causes to be high levels of cholesterol elevated blood pressure, and cigarette smoking.
High cholesterol levels are one of the main heart disease risk factor that can affect anyone from children to adults, although for several years it only affected the older generation. The threats from this heart disease risk factor are genetics, age, gender, as well as poor diet.
Elevated blood pressure can be another reason behind the development of heart diseases. This is a very clear heart disease risk factor because when ones blood pressure is elevated, the heart is put under a great amount of strain that eventually results in any one of the heart diseases, especially congestive heart failure, stoke, as well as kidney failure.
Smoking cigarettes is the other main heart disease risk factor. This is something most of us have knowledge about, although tobacco intake mostly associates itself with lung cancer and other ailments. Anyway, this is a main heart disease risk factor that causes a cardiac arrest, and a smoker is more prone to getting heart diseases compared to a non-smoker.
There is a heart disease risk calculator that uses several algorithms to calculate the risk of heart disease in different individuals. The example of one such calculator is the US News Risk Calculator that is very simple. This is only applicable to individuals aged between thirty and seventy four and yields a ten year risk of developing heart disease.