Taking Care of Your Heart Health in Your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s

“Heart health choices that you make when you are young will affect your life in later years,” says Joyce Oen-Hsiao, MD, cardiologist at Yale Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. “If you start following a healthy, active lifestyle when young, you will be more likely to maintain that healthy and active lifestyle as you get older.”

While preeclampsia or other pregnancy complications don’t guarantee heart problems later in life, Dr. Jellis says it’s good to know if you are part of a group that should be more proactive about your heart health.

What to Do Now

See a primary care physician. If you developed high blood pressure, preeclampsia, or gestational diabetes, or if you gave birth preterm, see a primary care physician after your baby is born, not just an ob-gyn. You may even want to see a cardiologist.

Even if you have never been pregnant, “everyone should have a primary care physician or provider, someone who they check in with on a regular basis, so that they are updated with the latest data and evidence as to what they should be doing,” Jellis says.

Eat to beat heart disease. Jellis suggests eating a Mediterranean-style diet, which is loaded with fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean protein such as fish, and healthy unsaturated fats like olive oil. Since you’ve got time on your side, developing healthy lifelong eating habits in your twenties and thirties can help keep your arteries clear.

Women in their forties often juggle a lot of responsibilities, says Jellis, but even though you are premenopausal and at a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, you still need to optimize your health and avoid as many risk factors as possible.

What to Do Now

• Total cholesterol less than 200 mg/dL
• LDL cholesterol less than 100 mg/dL
• HDL (“good”) cholesterol of 60 mg/dL or higher
• Triglycerides less than 150 mg/dL
• Blood pressure less than 120/80 mmHg
• Fasting blood sugar less than 100 mg/dL

  [12]

• BMI less than 25

Continue (or start) exercising. “Women whose lives were ‘too busy’ to exercise consistently in their thirties should try to start back to a good exercise regimen to try to reduce their risk of plaque formation,” says Oen-Hsiao. As women age, she adds, the arteries and heart can stiffen, which can add to increased blood pressure, but regular exercise can keep your arteries more flexible and lower this important number.

What to Do Now

Consider hormone therapy. While providers used to make generalized recommendations on hormone therapy, says Jellis, “this has evolved over time, and now we really advise women to seek guidance from their provider or from an endocrinologist, because it is based on an individualized approach.” In general, menopause replacement therapy is based on your personal risk factors and level, Jellis explains.

Assess your heart disease risk. Even if you feel fine, you can still have heart disease that’s not yet causing symptoms. Plugging in your age, cholesterol, blood pressure, and other details into the AHA’s online risk calculator will estimate your 10-year risk of heart disease.

What to Do Now

Keep your provider in the loop. At this point in life, Jellis recommends regular checkups with your health provider. “Your provider can look at the cumulative effect of the risk scores and be proactive about treatment,” she says. “If your calcium score is high, your provider may be more inclined to put you on more therapies and be aggressive about that risk factor targeting.” The more your provider knows about the state of your heart health, the more they can do to help.