Self Care To Prevent Heart Disease
- Jul 17, 2016
- 2 min read
Your aim with SELF CARE for any chronic disease is to prevent the disease. Should someone develop a disease; however, self care is doubly important. Self care is good to manage the disease and prevent premature death.
Self care will:
Improve quality of life
Prevent complications of the disease
Reduce the risks of developing other diseases
Prevent premature death
Prevention is better than cure, so self care before symptoms of the disease develop is ideal. This means early in adult life and not later. The best approach to self care is consumer health education. This article is providing consumer health education, but more is required.
Prevention
Knowing our risks for heart disease is key to prevention; taking action to reduce the risks is our responsibility.
These are the risk factors:
Hypertension
High cholesterol
Diabetes
Overweight/Obesity
Smoking
Air pollution
Unhealthy diet
Too little physical activity
Abuse of alcohol
Age, gender and hereditary also play a role in one's risk for heart disease; they are unavoidable risk factors.
It would only make sense that an absence of any of these risk factors will protect us from heart disease, RIGHT! Well firstly some risk factors are avoidable(modifiable), some are not.
The avoidable risk factors are the ones we can control, but the unavoidable ones we can't , they cannot be modified.
Fortunately by eliminating the avoidable ones we can reduce the risks of the unavoidable ones.
Example: Healthy Eating will REDUCE our risks for heart disease due to age, gender and hereditary. Physical activity will reduce our risks for heart disease due hypertension and obesity.
Our objective with self care is therefore, a lifestyle without the avoidable risk factors.
These are the avoidable risk factors:
-Smoking
-Unhealthy eating
-Lack of physical activity
-Air pollution
-Alcohol abuse
So you know your risk factors, you know that you must reduce or eliminate the avoidable ones to take care or your health and reduce the risks of the unavoidable ones.
Our next step would be to take action, action to live a lifestyle without avoidable risk factors.
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