How to Detect Heart Failure

Heart disease attacks many Americans. Men are at a higher risk for contacting heart disease than women. Understand that there are certain factors that you can take to avoid heart disease. Regular exercise regularly and proper diet are just a few preventative measures. New advances in medicine are currently being developed to find a better, cheaper, way to detect heart failure fairly quickly. While these are being developed, doctors have to rely on the other methods. Read on to learn more about how medical professionals detect heart failure.

Instructions

• 1

  Evaluate changes in your health and abilities. If it is becoming increasing difficult to climb a flight of stairs or walk up a heal, this could be early signs that it is a problem. Pains and shortness of breath is also an issue.

• 2

  Evaluate risk factors. This can be done by your doctor and is determined by a number of factors. High-risk people are treated immediately and aggressively, while intermediate risk patients are steadily becoming a concern for doctors. Intermediate risk means that the patient has about a 10 to 20 percent chance of developing heart disease in the next 10 years. Factors that go into determining how high is your risk is include family history of heart problems, gender (since men are at a higher risk than women), age, smoking, high blood pressure, high levels of bad cholesterol and diabetes.

• 3

  Get initial evaluation done. This also happens in the doctor's office. You will be asked to provide your medical and family history, give blood and have a quick physical.

• 4

  Have cholesterol check regularly. This is especially important for men who is at high or intermediate risk.

• 5

  Get a calcium CT or MRI scan done. This technology is rapidly becoming popular when trying to detect heart disease.Doctors want a way to check for blockages in the coronary arteries. What was used in the past, and is still being used, is very expensive and/or invasive. CT and MRI scans are not really effective when it comes to patient who are high-risk.

• 6

  Have a stress test done. These tests are conducted by having the patient walking or jogging on a treadmill. The intensity is constantly increased while monitoring the heart. This test have great at identifying people who are risk but didn't have many factors that would have make them high-risk patients.