Heart failure is a condition in which the heart cannot pump enough oxygen-rich blood to meet the body’s need.
In the condition, the heart may not be filled with enough blood or the heart cannot pump the blood to the rest of the body.
Although it does not mean the heart is head or the heart stops working, it is a serious heart issue and you need to seek doctor’s help.
So what causes heart failure?
Generally speaking, the damage to the heart can cause heart failure. Many chronic diseases, such as coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and obesity can lead to damage of the heart.
To prevent heart failure, the best method is to reduce any damage to heart and the risk of these chronic diseases.
Recent research shows that a healthy lifestyle, especially regular physical activity, can improve heart health.
One study from Johns Hopkins University reports that six years of exercise, or the lack of it, can strongly change the risk of heart failure.
The researchers analyzed health data from more than 11,000 American adults. The finding shows that people who took exercise in their middle age as few as six years had a much lower heart failure risk than people who had an sedentary lifestyle.
The researchers suggest that heart failure is different heart attack because it is a chronic, long-term disease built along the time. Therefore, daily lifestyle behaviors play a very important role in the development of the disease.
To reduce heart failure risk, people need to change unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking and not taking exercise.
Currently, it is recommended that one should take 150 minutes moderate to intensive physical activity every week.
The researchers find that if people do this in their middle age, they may reduce heart failure risk by 31%.
If they start to do exercise in the middle age and can continue to do it for six years, their heart failure risk can decrease 23%.
The researchers said that the finding is from observational research, and it is safe to say that regular exercise in middle age is linked to lower heart failure risk.
However, one cannot draw any conclusion about the causal effect between exercise and heart failure risk.
The authors said, “The population of people with heart failure is growing because people are living longer and surviving heart attacks and other forms of heart disease.”
“Unlike other heart disease risk factors like high blood pressure or high cholesterol, we don’t have specifically effective drugs to prevent heart failure, so we need to identify and verify effective strategies for prevention and emphasize these to the public.”
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