Heart Attack Raises Diabetes Risk

A study finds that after a heart attack, the risk of developing diabetes and pre-diabetes goes up sharply. Heart attack patients are four-and-a-half times more likely to develop the condition than the general population. The Lancet states that the heart patients are fifteen times more likely to develop high blood sugar.

Dr. Lionel Opie, director of the Hatter Cardiovascular Research Institute of the University of Cape Town, South Africa said that heart attack means that the chance of getting diabetes later is increased. The study led by Dr. Roberto Marchioli from the Laboratory of Clinical Epidemiology of Cardiovascular Disease, Consorzio Mario Negri Sud, Italy, collected information on 8300 Italian patients who suffered a heart attack.

These patients were not diabetic prior to the heart attack but a third of these patients developed diabetes or had impaired insulin resistance after more than three and a half years after the heart attack. These results showed the correlation between heart attack and high blood glucose.

The risk factors for diabetes are high blood pressure, age, the use of heart medicines like the beta blocker drugs to lower cholesterol levels and diuretics. Being overweight, an unhealthy diet and heavy drinking of alcohol also increase the risk and smoking increases it by 60%. It is therefore important to change the lifestyle in order to prevent diabetes. A Mediterranean diet can help prevent diabetes so did Marchioli say.

So what do we have to do to avoid this dire situation? It has been mentioned before but it bears repeating. Just follow the guide to physical activity and your heart. Know the risk factors. What are risk factors anyway? They are the habits and conditions that make one more liable to develop a disease and the chances are increased that the existing condition will worsen.

Now that we have cleared what it means by risk factors, let’s delve into the risk factors for heart disease. Certain risk factors for heart disease that you can’t do anything about are: a family history of early heart disease and getting older. But the other risks are something we can change. There is the physical activity factor which is a major risk factor for health disease. We can decide to get regular physical activity.

The other factors which are within our power to change are high blood pressure, overweight, high blood cholesterol, smoking and diabetes. Each of these risks increases the chance to develop heart disease. Let us not make that happen and give ourselves a fighting chance.

Each of those risks counts and will greatly increase the development of heart disease and heart attack. When the heart is damaged so is your life. There will be things you will not be able to do even simple ones like taking a walk or climbing up the stairs. But you have the power to change that.

Getting physically active is particularly important. Not only will it lower the risk to develop heart problems but also it reduces the risk to develop high blood pressure, lower the bad cholesterol, increase the good cholesterol and prevent or control diabetes. It can also help lose weight.

Now where else can you have power over your health? There’s smoking which is known to increase the risk of heart disease as much as six times than the non-smokers. You know what to do with that. You can do something about high blood cholesterol by being active, eating less trans fat, saturated fat and maintaining good weight.

How about high blood pressure? What power do you have over that? Get regular physical activity, cut down alcohol consumption, lose extra weight, and eat healthy using less salt and sodium. This will be good too for fighting diabetes and overweight for losing just 5 to 10% of the present weight will also reduce the risk of heart disease.

There you go; you have all the power in your hands to be as healthy as you can be. Let’s do it altogether. I have done all of those but am still having a hard time with the overweight thing because I am still ten pounds overweight. And to think I sometimes go to bed hungry, can you imagine that? I will be more than glad to receive your advice. Just click the link weight above and it will take you to my website where you can fill in a contact form.