Working towards heart health

By knowing your personal risk of developing cardiovascular disease (heart, stroke and blood vessel disease), you can make important changes that will improve your health and reduce your risk. Your risk of having a heart attack or stroke can range from mild to very high, based on your risk factors.

Factors such as age, ethnicity, other health conditions and family history all play a role in your individual risk. Also see Do you need a heart risk assessment?

Tracking your progress

It may be useful to keep a record of your risk factors, treatments, health improvement and lifestyle goals so that you can keep track of your progress. See the example Personal Record below.

If you are not seeing the improvements and risk lowering that you and your doctor or nurse had hoped for over a given period of time, you should go back to your health professional so that the advice, treatment or lifestyle programme can be reviewed and adjusted if necessary. There is often a slightly different approach that can be adopted, and may prove successful.

Also, if you feel that you are failing to follow the advice or programme you were given, it is important you go back to your health professional rather than give up completely. There may be problems or obstacles that you can talk about and overcome with the help of your doctor or nurse.

See also:

• Know Your Numbers Heart Age Calculator
• Tackling your heart risk factors

Original material provided by the Heart Foundation of New Zealand and the New Zealand Guidelines Group, March 2010. Reviewed by everybody, February 2011.