EmpowHer:
While people are trying to minimize the risk of heart disease, give women some warning signs and possible things that they should be aware of, that if they see, they should talk to a doctor.
Dr. Alfred Bove:
Well, from my standpoint, if you wait for clinical warning signs, you’ve missed the ball game, you know it’s the horse is out of the barn. I mean what you need, I keep saying -- you need to know your numbers, you need to know your blood pressure, you need to know your cholesterol. If you don’t know those numbers, I tell all of my patients, if you have a family doctor and he does your blood test, ask him for a copy of the blood test.
And one of the things I would expect on, let’s say, they all know Web tools and things like that would be the guidelines for what blood pressure should be. I mean there are standards out there for what they should be either or standards for what HDL, LDL should be in cholesterol and I think the first thing is, the first leg is somebody gets their blood work back and their cholesterol is 290 or their LDL is 170, that to me is the most important sign, way before any kind of symptom occurs.
What if their blood pressure is consistently 160/100 and their doctor keep saying, “Don’t worry about it, it’s just because you’re on the older side”, and I think those are things you got to be watching for. Not wait for heart disease to occur because the prevention process is much more powerful than what we can do after these things have happened.
Dr. Alfred Bove, MD, PhD is a Temple University professor emeritus of medicine, and their section chief of cardiology. Dr. Bove practices clinical cardiology with particular emphasis on heart failure, heart transplantation and he’s the Vice President of the American College of Cardiology.