Co-Host:  Bob Shartis of Action

Topic: Heart Health

Guests:  Bavna Mistry & Tamar Avkian – Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital

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Families in Action – March 4, 2013

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Families in Action with Cary Quashen air on AM-1220 KHTS Mondays from 12pm-1pm.

Welcome to Families in Action on your Hometown Station, AM 1220 KHTS. I am your host Cary Quashen along with my co-host, Bob Sharits of Action.

Today our guests will be Bavna Mistry and Tamar Avakian of the Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital.  They are here in today to talk about heart Health.

The first step to taking care of your heart is regular check ups, no matter how old you are.  You should always know your personal risk factors.

So I have had an annual checkup for the last few years.  Can they check for heart issues without putting me on a treadmill and hooking a bunch of things up to me?  Well there is something called the routine checkup that deal with cholesterol and blood pressure that we do on everyone, and if there is an anomaly in that test, then we tend to do the other tests such as the stress test.

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I always like to give a brief description of the heart and how it functions so we can understand it.  Normally the heart is a muscular organ, its main function is to squeeze and pump blood.  It pumps into the aorta then into all the rest of the body.  When we talk about heart disease, that means there is a build of blockage or “plaque” that is blocking the arteries.  This build up is a combination of cholesterol and fat and other things like that.

So is there stuff in my life I should be watching to avoid that?  There are a lot of “Risk factors” for heart disease.  It doesn’t happen over night, but it doesn’t show any symptoms until it is very advanced.

Heart attacks can happen to anyone, people who are young, active and healthy, it can happen.  But there are cretin risk factors.

There is what I call the big 4.  The first one is smoking, in addition to a host of other diseases, it also leads to heard disease.  The Hospital does offer programs that help you quit.

The other big ones are high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar, or glucose.  Also known as Diabetes.

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