Everyday Health: 9 Questions to Ask Your Doctor if Heart Disease Runs in Your Family

Everyday Health recently interviewed Janet Wei, MD, associate medical director of the Biomedical Imaging Research Institute at Cedars-Sinai, about how family history can influence heart disease risk and key questions patients should ask their doctor to better understand and manage that risk.

Wei, the Erika J. Glazer Chair in Women's Cardiovascular Research, Education and Innovation, told Everyday Health that proactive conversations with a physician are critical.

“If a first-degree relative like a parent or sibling had a sudden cardiac arrest before age 50, it doubles your risk of having an event yourself,” said Wei, an associate professor of Cardiology and Biomedical Sciences.

Wei told Everyday Health that people with high cholesterol may want to ask their doctor whether their children should be screened.

“We really should be screening children as young as 2 if a parent has high cholesterol,” she said. “There’s a condition called familial hypercholesterolemia in which bad cholesterol can be extremely high, and those people have higher risks for heart attack and stroke.”

Wei told Everyday Health that additional tests, such as coronary artery calcium scoring and lipoprotein-A screening, can help identify cardiovascular risk in people with a family history of heart attack or high cholesterol.

She noted that people who maintain a healthy lifestyle should still ask their physician about appropriate screenings and understand their key health markers, including blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

“You can have a normal body mass index and normal blood pressure, and appear asymptomatic,” she said, “but if your cholesterol is elevated, then we should consider medications for it, especially in light of any family cardiac history.

“If there’s a genetic cause for something like high cholesterol, only medication can bring it down.”

Read the complete article from Everyday Health.