Aging brings with it a number of challenges for heart health, and cardiovascular disease is a major concern in later life.
Keeping your heart healthy is essential to continue living a full and active life, but if you do not take some precautions and do not monitor your cardiovascular conditions, the risk of pathologies such as atherosclerosis and heart failure increases with age.
It is important to adopt a healthy lifestyle, which includes a balanced diet, regular exercise, and control of risk factors such as smoking and diabetes. To better understand this topic, we interviewed Dr. Giuseppina Santese, surgeon, cardiology specialist, Health Director of the Losam Polyclinic and the San Nicolò di Carpi Polyclinic.
There are many good habits that should be followed constantly. This applies to all ages, but surely when the years begin to advance, say more or less in the decades from 65 onwards, it is very important first of all to do physical activity on a regular basis: a walk of about 40 minutes every day is certainly a correct way to keep moving.
Second point, of course, to treat nutrition, then avoid hyper-processed foods, try to prefer healthy foods and, above all, limit the use of salt. Similarly, it is important to hydrate properly.
Another important point is certainly to keep your mind trained, continuing to learn and solicit it with exercises. Reading, for example, helps in maintaining a higher mood tone and be, therefore, more positive and optimistic.
It is also essential to try to sleep properly. Sleep quality is very important at all ages, and even in the most advanced, having regular and seamless sleep allows you to rest properly and be more active during the day.
Last but not least, regular medical checks. Especially when age advances, we know that the body undergoes a series of changes that need to be kept under control. Undertorew to regular check-ups also allows you to identify certain problems early and to be able to solve them before they manifest themselves with a symptomatology or more serious problems.
Risk factors are obviously more or less equal to all ages, although they clearly change as they age.
There are some factors that are called “unmodifiable risk factors,” and are:
There are also modifiable risk factors:
Cardiovascular disease in the elderly are more or less the same as young people. But the most widespread ones are undoubtedly to be found in cardiovascular ischemic causes, such as stroke, and in myocardial infarction.
As for the heart closely, these issues are often associated with risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol.
Another of the main causes is heart failure. More than 15% of people over 65 years of age have a deficiency of the heart pump that then turns into the syndrome called, in fact, “heart failure”. Very often, it is associated with other conditions, such as heart attack or hypertension.
Another anomaly that often manifests itself with advancing age is the arrhythmia: in particular, atrial fibrillation arrhythmia is present in more than 10% of people over the age of 70 and can have a serious impact, as it is one of the risk factors for the onset of stroke.
It should be remembered how important it is to identify arrhythma early and begin the most appropriate treatment, such as anticoagulant therapy, whose use is currently spreading considerably, because, it can avoid the onset of heart-ymboobolic stroke.
The last important point in older people is to identify the “alterations of the heart valves”, these are degenerative alterations of the age-related heart valves, which can manifest themselves with symptoms such as fatigue or shortness. They must be identified early and then treated properly.
Each person has their own history and when the heart begins to age, it obviously depends on the number of risk factors present and how well these risk factors have been controlled and cured.
So, in reality, there is no definite age. Very often we meet people of 90 years who have a biological age very different from the registry. They are always important, however, the correct prevention and the correct identification of problems so that we can guarantee, then, an appropriate therapy.
By definition, the heartbeat should be in a range between 60 and 100 beats, and this value applies to everyone. It is clear that a lot depends on some variables: for example, many elderly patients are on medication that control their heartbeat, such as beta-blockers.
The heartbeat also depends very much on the physical activity that is regularly carried out. Many older people regularly engage in exercise and tend to have a lower heartbeat.
However, more than the heartbeat itself it is very important to know and keep your heart rate under control. In fact, any alterations in the rhythm, such as accelerations or bradycardia, can be a sign of small problems that, as soon as they are identified, the sooner they can be solved, avoiding the manifestation of more serious problems.
The heart, like all other organs, goes to meet a series of partly physiological changes that, in some cases, can become pathological.
First of all, the heart becomes less elastic, especially at the level of the arteries. This situation manifests itself with more rigid arteries, which causes an increase in blood pressure which, in turn, can be atherosclerosis.
The heart muscle can also become more rigid and this can result in altered heart function. If this condition degenerates, we may experience heart failure which, as we have said, is a very frequent condition with advancing age.
There may then be a fibrosis of the electrical tissue, that is, the tissue that transmits the electric pulse of the beat. In the elderly person this condition can often induce a change in the heartbeat that tends to be slowed down. In some cases it can manifest itself with bradyarrhythmias or blockages, so it is necessary to resort to the pacemaker system to solve the anomaly.
That is why, in all cases, the correct monitoring of hemodynamic parameters is very important.
Currently, heart failure is an extremely important pathology for the elderly and is practically the first reason of hospitalization after age 65.
This problem recognizes two main risk factors:
Other causes are to be found, for example, in the degeneration of the valves that leads to an overload of the heart and, therefore, to a heart failure; or even in non-isochemical heart diseases, such as accumulation diseases, which sometimes have a very important impact in the older population.
Often in the elderly an arrhythmia that occurs with a sudden rapid heartbeat, such as atrial fibrillation, can be a cause of heart failure.
Consideration should also be given to non-typically cardiac causes; concomitant inflammation that may also be due to a simple flu may be a predisposing factor for the onset of heart failure. Sudden anemia or alterations in hormone tests are also triggers for heart failure.
