I've been reading this forum for a while, but have only joined to chime in here. Please excuse my butting in, but I feel strongly about this and want to help. There is a lot that can be done to check your heart. Unfortunately, most mainstream doctors don't perform these checks or recommend them or maybe even know about them. I am not a doctor, but have been looking into this to make sure I do what I can to avoid getting a heart attack (just turned 50). I also don't know what age it's a good idea to start this at, but if you are taking risks, you might want to do it regardless.
My main source where I got plugged into this was Dr. Davis' site:
www.trackyourplaque.com . You can google info to find other sites as well.
As DC mentioned, very important to have a heart scan. (You can get a heart scan without the full body scan, if funds are tight.) What they'll do is give you an overall score AND the percentile you fall into for your sex and age. A score of 10 or less is considered no risk. People can have triple digit scores. Any score can be reduced to lower your risk, by taking appropriate action.
The heart scan detects plaque which is built up inside the wall of the artery. This type of plaque can rupture which then causes a clot to form resulting in the heart attack. This type of plaque is NOT the same as blockage detected by a stress test. That's the reason you have people who have an incident not long after passing a stress test (e.g. President Clinton & bypass surgery, Tim Russert & death). The plaque does not block the artery and cause symptoms. Your heart can pump like crazy lifting heavy iron or doing cardio and you think you're OK because you feel fine. (Think runner Jim Fixx, for those of you old enough.)
Blood tests are important, if you get the right ones. Some things to test:
HDL
Vitamin D
Triglycerides
C-reactive protein
Homocysteine
Fibrinogen
LDL is important, but not how you get it on most tests (LDL, HDL & total). There are different LDL particle sizes and it's the small LDL that's the real problem. Niacin can be used to reduce the amount of LDL and raise HDL. The no-flush varieties are useless. Niacin can stress the liver, but from what I've read, 500 mg is OK for the majority of people.
Besides Niacin, other things that help are: raw almonds, pectin powder (pectin is the stuff in orange rinds), raw walnuts, fish oil, fiber (Metamucil), oat bran, and cutting back on wheat products. (At the extreme, Dr. Mercola recommends dropping all grains.)
Dr. Davis recommends statins to get cholesterol very low in order to reduce plaque scores. Some are against statin use. (Is it big pharma again? Are there side effects, etc.?)
Making headlines more recently is the importance of vitamin D - maybe more important than all other factors. See:
**broken link removed**
Blood pressure - it should go without saying, should be under control. I'm skeptical about lower recommendations (<120, <80). Is it just big pharma trying to sell more drugs? On the other hand, Dr. Davis reports that people in remote African villages have a BP around 90/60.
There's also BMI, but my guess is that the community in this forum is not considered in that analysis. On the other hand, some do hold the idea that weight, be it muscle or fat, is a risk. I don't know what the answer is there.
Sorry about the length of this and again, I apologize for butting in as my first post. I hope this info will be useful to some.