Healio: Preventing, Diagnosing and Treating Heart Disease in Men

With June designated as Men’s Health Month, Healio.com reporter Janel Miller recently interviewed Michelle Kittleson, MD, PhD, about preventing, diagnosing and treating cardiovascular disease in men.

“Heart disease will likely always be one of the most common killers of men because as you get older, heart disease is the final common pathway of many other conditions such as hypertension and diabetes,” Kittleson, a cardiologist in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai, told Healio. “But it’s important to note that the severity and the age of presentation is increasing, and the prognosis is so much better than it used to be. This is due to greater awareness of the preventive measures, diagnostic tools, therapeutic approaches and interventions that we have now that have enabled heart disease to become a chronic treatable condition, rather than a uniformly progressive and fatal one.”

Men often seek treatment after noticing that they have shortness of breath or chest pain when they are exercising or exerting themselves but the symptoms lessen during rest, Kittleson told Healio.com.

“So exercise is important for two reasons: first, patients who exercise on a regular basis are usually in better shape with less hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, and obesity,” Kittleson told Healio. “Second, regular exercise is a built-in early detection system; patients who exercise daily have a better sense how their heart is doing than someone who sits on the couch all day. So, my advice to primary care physicians would be to ask your patients about exercise and to be aware of subtle changes on their exercise tolerance, because if shortness of breath and chest pain are what’s limiting activities, then that’s a red flag for heart disease and warrant further discussions and testing.”

Click here to read the complete story on Healio.com.