There was more distressing news for women from researchers reporting at the 64th Annual Canadian Cardiovascular Congress in Vancouver. To the surprise of no one who’s been following women’s heart health lately, a Heart and Stroke Foundation study has found that women under age 55 fare worse than their male counterparts following a heart attack, and their health status declines more than that of their male counterparts. Continue reading “Women under age 55 fare worse after heart attack than men”
Category: Living with heart disease
posts here focus on the “new normal” you’ll discover once you get home from hospital and the reality starts to sink in
Three things that make you happy – and three things that won’t
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
It turns out that feeling happy can actually improve our overall physical health – but there’s a catch. According to an article in Harvard Medical School’s HealthBeat last month, positive emotions may need to be longterm in order to produce good health. In other words:
“Thinking positive thoughts for a month when you already have heart disease won’t cure the disease. But lowering your stress levels over a period of years with a positive outlook and relaxation techniques could reduce your risk of heart problems.”
Continue reading “Three things that make you happy – and three things that won’t”
What heart patients can learn from cancer patients
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Cardiologist Dr. Richard Fogoros has issued this blunt warning to those at risk for developing heart disease:
“You need to change your life. If you don’t, you will suffer the consequences – possibly decades earlier than is necessary.”
In his Heart Health Center column, he observed that most high-risk people end up making only half-hearted efforts to modify their heart attack risk. And he blamed doctors for enabling this lack of personal accountability. Continue reading “What heart patients can learn from cancer patients”
Top 10 tips from the author of ‘How To Be Sick’
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Ten years ago this summer, law professor Toni Bernhard and her husband flew from their home in California to Paris, planning to immerse themselves in Parisian culture for three weeks. But on the second day there, Toni became very sick with what appeared to be an acute viral infection. She spent most of those three weeks in a Parisian bed. And ten years later, Toni is still sick.
Despite being mostly bed-ridden, she wrote a book she called How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers and she also blogs at HowToBeSick.com.
To mark her 10th anniversary milestone, the medical website KevinMD.com ran Toni’s list of 10 lessons she has learned about being sick. Here is a sampling of those tips, remarkably useful for those of us living with heart disease, too: Continue reading “Top 10 tips from the author of ‘How To Be Sick’”
Heart Sisters 