Lifestyle Factors can cause Death

February 17th, 2012Lifestyles, Risk Factors0 comments

Many people have “risk factors” for certain diseases and often don’t know they have them or are unaware that many of these risk factors can lead to chronic illness, sudden death, disability, and prolonged suffering and death.

What are the major risk factors for an early death? These include living with untreated high blood pressure, having diabetes, eating too much fat in your diet, having high cholesterol and smoking cigarettes or using other tobacco products. These risk factors can cause cancer, heart disease and stroke.

Some of these things we all know about or they have symptoms that tell us we have the disease. Others are silent killers that take away our lives without us even knowing we were ill. For example, high cholesterol and high blood pressure often have no particular symptoms, while diabetes, smoking and eating excess fat are usually known factors. Nevertheless, people don’t recognize the relationship between the risk factor and the disease.

A recent study was performed on a group of 250,000 individuals 18 years of age or older to see if having a risk factor meant you were at greater risk for a cardiovascular event such as heart attack, congestive heart failure or stroke. The study was done on both black and white populations. The “study” wasn’t actually a single study but was the combination of several major and important studies done on heart disease including the Framingham Heart Study, the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults, the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis and the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial.

The studies did an examination of middle to older age persons from age 45 to 75 and looked at their risk factors. A normal person was considered to have a BP less than 120/80, a total cholesterol below 180 mg/dL, be a nonsmoker and have no diabetes whatsoever. Everyone else was considered to have at least one risk factor for heart disease.

Those men in middle age with no risk factors had a 1.4 percent chance of having a heart attack or stroke before the age of 80. Those with at least 2 risk factors had a nearly 50 percent chance of having a cardiovascular event, particularly a heart attack.

Women in middle age who were without risk factors had a 4 percent chance of having a heart disease problem before age 80, while women with at least two of the above risk factors ran a risk of heart-related events of 31 percent. In addition, blacks seem to suffer more cardiovascular events because they have more risk factors on average than whites.