Women and Heart Health: The Ins and Outs
If you are a woman, there is almost no issue more important in regards to your health than that regarding your heart. After all it is your heart that makes the rest of your body function and which keeps your body breathing and moving, so you need to take care of your heart and you will be taking care of your entire body as a result.
There are a few things in particular that you are going to need to be aware of on the topic of women and heart health. Before you will really be able to understand about women and heart health and women health and wellness in general however you are going to need to learn more about the heart in general and how it works.
The Heart
The heart is obviously the most important organ in the body, but it is important to understand how it actually works. Basically, in the simplest terms, the heart is a muscle that is about the size of your fist. It works like a pump and beats about 100,000 times a day, sending blood through your vessels and into the major organs in your body.
The heart has two sides, separated by an inner wall that is known as the septum. It is the right side of the heart which pumps blood to the lungs to pick up oxygen, and the left side carries the oxygen-rich blood which has returned from the lungs and from which it is pumped to the body.
When it comes to women and heart health, it is important to know that there are a few heart-related problems that occur commonly among women. It used to be that people thought that heart disease and related conditions were more of a man's disease, which explains why it is quite surprising when we learned that women are at risk for heart disease and heart attacks just as much as men.
If you want to be educated on the matter of women and heart health you need to know what you can do to protect yourself against these types of conditions. For both men and women the biggest factors that contribute to heart disease are smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, family history and age.
Some of these are optional, such as smoking and high cholesterol, optional meaning that there are things that you can do to change them, whereas others are not, such as family history and age.
