According to statistics, various heart diseases such as coronary heart disease, high blood pressure or heart attacks are listed among the most common killer diseases in the developed countries of the world.

A heart attack can happen to anybody. Moreover, during the last decades of the 20th century heart disease, so to say, ‘grew younger’ – more and more people started to have heart attacks at a much younger age.

Even though this information sounds pretty much like bad news, there is good news to counterpoise it: you can take action to significantly lower your risks of having a heart attack and improve chances of preventing the development of heart diseases. So, let us take a look at some of the major factors causing heart problems and at some of the things you can do for avoiding them.

Doctors discern two major types of causal or contributing factors, which can lead to heart attacks. Those are uncontrollable and controllable factors. The uncontrollable ones are your age, family heredity and gender.

The controllable factors include low physical activity, smoking, gaining extra weight or obesity, high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, and diabetes. The good news is that these controllable factors play major part in increasing or lowering your risks of having a heart attack or developing any other heart diseases.

The most common cause of heart attack is the inability of heart to pump blood through your blood vessels and to supply your organs with oxygen and nutrients necessary for their proper work. This happens when your coronary arteries get clogged and their throughput capacity significantly decreases. Clogged arteries can result in constant chest pain and even in permanent heart muscle damage.

The problem is that many people believe that heart attack is something that happens to somebody else. They do not take the warnings seriously and heed the advice of their doctors. Moreover, the health conditions that precede heart attack can be developed gradually and invisibly for the patients.

So, the best thing you can do to avoid having a heart attack or other heart disease problem is to get educated about major health, lifestyle and dietary controllable factors, which contribute to ruining your cardiovascular health.

Your lifestyle is directly connected with your heart’s health. Thus, changing your lifestyle means changing your prospects of having heart attack and significantly lowering the risks of having any heart problems in your life.