In medicine, the risk factors for developing a heart attack fall into two main categories: those you can control and those you can’t.

Unfortunately, the risk of a heart attack increases in men, post-menopausal women, with increasing age and if there is any family history of heart disease. Those are factors out of your control, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t take steps drastically decreases the chances of ever having a heart attack.

This leads to the category of modifiable risk factors, those which you can keep under control if you make the smart decision to do so: smoking, high blood pressure, increased blood lipids (triglycerides and LDL cholesterol) and poorly controlled diabetes. Anything that causes plaque formation in the arteries, such as high blood glucose or cigarette smoke, ultimately leads to vessel narrowing, which means that the heart will lack sufficient blood supply, ultimately leading to the symptoms of a heart attack.

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