Top 10 healthy heart tips

A healthy lifestyle will make your heart healthier. Here are 10 things you can do to look after your heart.

Get your 5 A DAY
Eat at least five portions of a variety of fruit and vegetables a day. They're a good source of fibre, vitamins and minerals. There are lots of tasty ways to get your 5 A DAY, like adding chopped fruit to cereal or including vegetables in your pasta sauces and curries. Get more 5 A DAY fruit and veg tips.

Eat fish
Eat fish at least twice a week, including a portion of oily fish. Fish such as mackerel, sardines, fresh tuna and salmon are a source of omega-3 fats, which can help protect against heart disease.
Pregnant or breastfeeding women shouldn't have more than two portions of oily fish a week.

Get active
Getting – and staying – active can reduce your risk of developing heart disease. It can also be a great mood booster and stress buster.
Do 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity every week. One way to achieve this target is by doing 30 minutes of activity on five days a week. Fit it in where you can, such as by cycling to work.

Manage your weight
Being overweight can increase your risk of heart disease. Stick to a healthy, balanced diet low in fat and sugar, with plenty of fruit and vegetables, combined with regular physical activity.
Find out if you are a healthy weight with the BMI calculator. If you're overweight, try our 12-week weight loss plan.

Eat more fibre
Eat plenty of fibre to help lower your risk of heart disease – aim for at least 30g a day. Eat fibre from a variety of sources, such as wholemeal bread, bran, oats and wholegrain cereals, potatoes with their skins on, and plenty of fruit and veg.

Cut down on saturated fat
Eating too many foods that are high in saturated fat can raise the level of cholesterol in your blood. This increases your risk of heart disease. Choose leaner cuts of meat and lower-fat dairy products like 1% fat milk over full-fat (or whole) milk.


Cut down on salt
To maintain healthy blood pressure, avoid using salt at the table and try adding less to your cooking. Once you get used to the taste of food without added salt, you can cut it out completely.
Watch out for high salt levels in ready-made foods. Most of the salt we eat is already in the foods we buy. Check the food labels – a food is high in salt if it has more than 1.5g salt (or 0.6g sodium) per 100g. Adults should eat less than 6g of salt a day in total – that's about one teaspoon.

Give up smoking
If you're a smoker, quit. It's the single best thing you can do for your heart health.
Smoking is one of the main causes of coronary heart disease. A year after giving up, your risk of a heart attack falls to about half that of a smoker.
You're more likely to stop smoking for good if you use NHS stop smoking services. Visit the Smokefree website or ask your GP for help with quitting.

Drink less alcohol
Don't forget alcohol contains calories. Regularly drinking more than the NHS recommends can have a noticeable impact on your waistline. Try to keep to the recommended daily alcohol limits to reduce the risk of serious problems with your health, including risks to your heart health.

Read the food label
When shopping, it's a good idea to look at the label on food and drink packaging to see how many calories and how much fat, salt and sugar the product contains. Understanding what is in food and how it fits in with the rest of your diet will help you make healthier choices.

Know the threats of your headphones

Technology is progressing every day. Along with its comfort and luxury comes their bad effect on health. You will find people using headphones or earphones everywhere, be it metros, trains, buses and even while jogging or walking.

In this today’s trend, headphones and earphones are one such technology that is associated with many hidden health issues that most of the youngsters are unaware.

“Do you sometime just hear a random beep sound, and are worst when the background sound is low? Then you are already suffering from tinnitus due to headphones.

Technology and gadgets are to make our lives easy, but should be used in limit. Avoid tiny earphones that directly go into the ear canal.

Make sure the earphones are sanitised before using. In addition, do not use them while travelling unless it is necessary.” says Dr T Srinivasan.
Mentioned below are some more hazards of headphones and earphones:

Ear infections
Do you share your earphones with your family and friends? Ever thought if this practice is really safe? Then, no! Sharing earphones with others is definitely not safe as there are high chances of you having an ear infection. It happens because; the bacteria from ears of different people effortlessly travel through headphones. So next time you use it, ensure sanitising it.


Hearing loss or hearing complications
On wearing headphones or earphones with volume over 90 decibels, it could result in having hearing complications or hear loss. If anyone listens at more than 100 decibels for more even 15 minutes, he can face hearing complications. Prolonged exposure to loud sounds is the most common cause of tinnitus. Up to 90 per cent of people with tinnitus have some level of noise-induced hearing loss. To escape from such complications give some rest to your earphones and do not listen to music in high volume.


No air passage
Now days, there are earphones that deliver excellent audio experience, but with best audio experience comes health risk. Earphones are built to insert in the ear canal that blocks the air passage, which could result in higher ear infection risk. In most of cases, people who use regular earphones and headphones experience more ear wax, which results in tinnitus, ear infection and even problem in hearing.


Negative effect on brain
Earphones these days produce some electromagnetic waves that can be dangerous for your brain. Although, there are no strong evidence that have proved the theory, but daily users of Bluetooth and earphones have been found to have some or other sort of brain related problems. The inner ear is directly linked to the brain; even a little infection in the inner ear can directly affect the brain and can lead to serious health concerns.


Numbness and pain in the ear
New Studies suggest that people who use earphones quiet often are prone to loud music can leave the ear numb for a while. Although this numbness comes back to normal, but this numbness on a long run can be fatal and may cause deafness. You will feel some strange and different sounds buzzing in your ears. Most of the people who regularly tend to use earphone visit doctor with a complaint of severe ear pain.

Hospitals Slashed Use of 2 Heart Drugs After Price Hikes

Even before media reports and a congressional hearing vilified Valeant Pharmaceuticals International for raising prices on a pair of lifesaving heart drugs, Dr. Umesh Khot knew something was very wrong.

Khot is a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, which prides itself on outstanding heart care. The health system's pharmacists had alerted doctors about the skyrocketing cost of the drugs, nitroprusside and isoproterenol. But these two older drugs, frequently used in emergency and intensive care situations, have no direct alternatives.

"If we are having concerns, what is happening nationally?" Khot wondered.
As it turned out, a lot was happening.

Following major price increases, use of the two cardiac medicines has dramatically decreased at 47 hospitals, according to a research letter Khot and two others published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The number of patients getting nitroprusside, which is given intravenously when a patient's blood pressure is dangerously high, decreased 53 percent from 2012 to 2015. At the same time, its price per 50 milligrams jumped thirtyfold, from $27.46 in 2012 to $880.88 in 2015.

The use of isoproterenol, key in monitoring and treating heart-rhythm problems during surgery, decreased 35 percent as the price per milligram rose from $26.20 to $1,790.11.

The drugs, which are off patent, have long been go-to medicines for doctors.

"This isn't like a cholesterol medicine, these are really, very specialized drugs," said Khot, who is lead author on the peer-reviewed research letter. When patients get the drugs, "they are either sick beyond sick in intensive care or they're under anesthesia [during] a procedure."

Valeant bought the drugs in early 2015 from Marathon Pharmaceuticals. Valeant announced a rebate program last year to lower the price hospitals paid for the drugs. And Valeant's Lainie Keller, a vice president of communications, said the company is committed to limiting price increases.

"The current management team is committed to ensuring that past decisions with respect to product pricing are not repeated," Keller said in a statement Wednesday.

Erin Fox, who directs drug information at the University of Utah Health Care, said the letter reveals "exactly what a lot of pharmacists have been talking about. When prices are unsustainable, you have to stop using the drug whenever you can. You just can't afford it."

Fox said her Utah health system removed isoproterenol from its bright-red crash carts, which are stocked for emergencies like heart attacks. Nitroprusside is more difficult to replace.

"It is one if you need it, you need it," Fox said. "That's exactly why the usage has not gone down to zero even with the huge price increases."

Cleveland Clinic leaders spent months investigating each drug's use and potential alternatives, Khot said.

"We're not going to ration or restrict this drug in any way that would negatively impact these patients," Khot said, adding that he hopes to do more research on how the decreased use of both drugs affected patients.

Dr. Richard Fogel, a cardiologist and electrophysiologist at Ascension, a large nonprofit hospital chain with facilities in 22 states and the District of Columbia, told a Senate committee last year that the cost of the two drugs alone drove a nearly $12 million increase in Ascension's spending over one year.

"While we understand a steady, rational increase in prices, it is the sudden, unfounded price explosions in select older drugs that hinder us in caring for patients," Fogel said.


The NEJM letter also analyzed two other drugs – nitroglycerin and dobutamine – that remained stable in price as a control group. The number of patients treated with nitroglycerin, a drug used for chest pain and heart failure, increased by 89 percent, but Khot warned that the drugs can't always be used as substitutes.