“What are the earliest symptoms of heart disease?”
Heart disease, unfortunately, runs in my family. I am now 35 and am doing my best to keep up a healthy lifestyle. Are there any very early symptoms I should watch out for?
3 Answers
Unfortunately there is no single answer because. There is much variability but the most common would be new exercise intolerance that wasn’t there before such as exertional chest pain, neck or jaw pain, shortness of breath or unexplained fatigue with minimal activity. Of course there are those that have no fore warning signs. However if you adhere to a healthy life style including your diet, regular exercise, control risk factors (cholesterol, obesity, hypertension and diabetes) your risk for an early cardiac event would be extremely low.
Exercise puts demand on the heart to work harder so often the first sign of heart disease is a sustained decline in exercise capacity, despite continuing to try to be active. If you notice this, it would be helpful to undergo a stress/exercise ECG test.
Actually, at this age I would not expect symptoms. You should check you lipids and make sure your LDL is below 100 and your HDL is high. You may want o get a calcium scoring done. Investigate this test: you might find it useful at this age.
