Professor's four things people in their 40s and 50s must do to slash heart attack risk

A medical expert has outlined the four things people can do in their 40s and 50s to reduce the risks of having a heart attack by two-thirds. Even people who are on medication for blood pressure and cholesterol can drastically reduce their chances of having a serious problem.

Speaking on the Zoe podcast, Professor Eric Rimm, Director of the Program in Cardiovascular Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health explained that the advice was simple but would have a profound impact. He was asked by the Zoe CEO Jonathan Wolf what people needed to do and explained: “Simple things like, you know, a healthy body weight, exercise, not smoking and a healthy diet. And in the healthy diet, we put in a little bit of alcohol for people that drink, but you can explain 60 to 80% of heart attacks.”

Prof Rimm said that if everyone carried out those four pieces of advice they would get rid of 70 to 80% of heart attacks in women and 60 to 70% of heart attacks in men which is the ‘number one killer’. He added: “So if you can get rid of something, 60 to 80% of it just by making healthier lifestyle choices. And even in our studies in men and women, we see even people as you mentioned earlier who are in their forties and fifties and are making maybe taking medication for high blood pressure or high cholesterol, even tho those populations that make healthy choices can get rid of 60% of their risk of heart attack.”

Mr Wolf said: “I just want to make sure that you’re saying that even if you are in your forties or fifties and maybe you’ve got all of those risk factors or many of those if you make a real change to your lifestyle, you can really dramatically reduce your chance of having a heart attack. “

And in reply, Prof Rimm said it was ‘amazing’ that doing this could lead to a fourfold drop in the risk of heart disease. He said: “50 to 70% of the heart disease that happens among people who are taking medicine, you could get rid of if people exercised, you know, had a healthy weight, had a good diet and didn’t smoke.”

After being asked how people should assess how fit they are he said that the way his team looked at it was to give people a score from 0 to 5 based on lifestyle. He gave an example of exercise where the base was half an hour a day or the equivalent over a week - so 2.5 to 3.5 hours a week of moderate to vigorous activity get a 'one'. Less than that is zero. A healthy diet (in the top 40 per cent) gets a point, with smoking getting a zero, and not smoking a one.

Weight as well with those getting a point if their BMI is less than 25. Prof Rimm said: “So these are just relatively simple cutoffs and we were just counting people. 001. So you could have a zero all the way up to a five. And if you had a five, which means you were healthy in all of those and therefore your risk of heart disease was 3 to 4 times lower than people who are zeros and it was still 2 to 3 times lower than people who are one. So it’s, and it’s a beautiful, very nice linear scale. The more healthy things you have the lower your risk of heart disease.”