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Dr. Iva Smolens
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VIDEO: Lifestyle Tips To Prevent Heart Disease By Dr. Iva Smolens

Dr. Smolens provides three lifestyle tips to prevent heart disease.

Dr. Smolens:
Ladies, I’d like to give you three tips for lifestyle modifications to help reduce your risk for heart disease. Number one, if you are a smoker, stop smoking.

Number two, control all of your medical comorbidities. Take care of your high blood pressure and your diabetes. And number three, probably one of the most important things is 30 minutes of exercise a day, even if it’s in the form of just walking briskly through your neighborhood. Those three things will help decrease your risk of heart disease throughout your lifetime.

There are a list of risk factors for women, specific to women, that increase our risk of heart disease, and those things, some of which are correctable and some are not. Certain things that we can address and correct–smoking cessation--that’s probably one of the biggest things and probably the easiest thing to correct, although I guess many smokers might say it’s not so easy.

Lifestyle modifications including weight loss and addressing issues of obesity. Obesity is on the rise in this country and simple things like diet modification and exercise can address that. And then, medical management; people need to be much more aggressive in their own medical healthcare addressing things like diabetes and high blood pressure. Those things we can help and address correct.

Unfortunately, some of our risk factors that we can’t change or correct are gender; female gender increases our risk of heart disease. Genetic factors, family history of heart disease, we can’t undo. But some of the other issues that I mentioned we can and we need to be aggressive in altering our lifestyle to change those things.

About Dr. Smolens, M.D.:
Board Certified Cardiothoracic Surgeon Iva Smolens, M.D., serves as medical director of the Women's Heart Center at Banner Heart Hospital in Mesa, Arizona. She is currently a partner with Red Mountain Cardiothoracic Surgeons in Chandler, Ariz., and serves on the American Heart Association’s Board of Directors for the Phoenix metropolitan area.

For More Information On Heart Disease And Banner Health Visit www.BannerHealth.com/BannerHeart