this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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People who look fit and feel well can be in terrible cardiovascular health without realising.
Also, the damage that accumulates while you're feeling fine is irreversible.
Reminds me of my doctor (who's a friend) telling me of a patient who's husband just dropped dead at 50 something. "He was in such a great health " the lady said, "never ever went to see a doctor!"
Well, there might be a funking correlation right there.
Care to elaborate?
I recently had a heart attack at 41.
I'm not obese and look and feel fit and well. I cycle regularly and don't eat a lot of refined foods (particularly carbs). I didn't think I was particularly "fit" but nor did I think I was at risk of heart disease. About 2 months before my heart attack I rode my mountain bike 150km over rough, remote, Australian terrain in 4 days.
Yes I have high cholesterol, have been a smoker in the past, and a family history of type 2 diabetes - I knew these things were problematic in some vague sense but no idea how they relate to cardio problems. Also information is very complex - there's a lot of misinformation about cholesterol for example and as someone who is not a cardiologist it's hard to know what it really means.
Basically, shit builds up in your arteries over time. You feel 100% fine until something clogs up. It's not a progressive deterioration of feeling unwell and not doing anything about it, it's fine > fine > fine > fine > dead. There's no therapy to clean the shit out of your arteries, it doesn't get reduced over time. Once an artery clogs the options are inserting an internal scaffold, or taking an artery from somewhere else to build a by-pass.
I kind of got unlucky but also lucky - unlucky with all of these contributing (mostly hereditory) factors - lucky in that my arteries are generally ok - there was only one bad spot which could be remedied with an internal scaffold. Imagine feeling fine through to your 60s and then finding that your arteries are generally fucked with many trouble spots.
I shouldn't be alarmist in that I don't think this is a problem for people generally, but in terms of things I recently learned that everyone should know - I think cardiovascular health is definitely on that list.
Suffice to say I recently learned that feeling fine does not necessarily mean that you are fine.
It really can be a silent killer. I know someone who's mother was in her 50s. She was thin, fit, active and seemingly healthy. She would enter in races and such, to give you an idea of how fit she was compared to others in their 50s. Now, she wasn't exactly a professional runner or anything, but certainly did it more than others at her age.
Well she died of a heart attack a few months ago during a workout...
Thank you for bringing this up. I'm a nurse on a cardiovascular progressive care unit, and we get a handful of young people (40-50s) who come in with "no prior history" having heart attacks or borderline heart attacks.
One of the things I'd note is that most of them have high blood pressure that they didn't know about. High blood pressure doesn't feel bad, so they never felt a need to see a doctor. But it is silently damaging arteries, particularly the delicate ones in your heart, kidneys, and brain.
The only way to know if you are developing high blood pressure is to get it checked regularly. Get an automatic blood pressure cuff for your house, or go to your primary care physician once a year. And when they tell you that 140/90 is putting you at higher risk of heart attack, take them seriously.