Understanding your risk factors for coronary artery disease (CAD) is highly important to prevention and treatment. A risk factor is a characteristic or lifestyle habit that increases your chances for developing a particular health problem. Uncontrollable risk factors are those characteristics that you cannot change or manage, such as age, gender, ethnicity and family history. Likewise, controllable risk factors are manageable characteristics and lifestyle habits that you can control. For example, you can modify your weight and tobacco use. You can control elevated blood pressure with medications, diet restrictions and regular aerobic exercise. People with diabetes can control their blood sugar.

Uncontrollable risk factors for CAD

• Family history - Do you have other family members with CAD? The body's production and utilization of cholesterol can be inherited. An immediate family member, such as a parent or sibling, with CAD increases your risk more than a distant relative, such as a cousin.
• Increasing age - Atherosclerosis and loss of artery elasticity increase with age.
• Gender - Men's risk for CAD begins at age 40, while women's risk doesn't increase until after menopause or surgical removal of the ovaries lowers estrogen levels, rapidly increasing women's CAD risk until it equals that of men's.
• Race - African Americans have an increased risk for heart disease and statistically higher CAD fatality rates.

Controllable risk factors for CAD
Take control of the following risk factors:

• Tobacco - Smokers have double the risk for heart attack compared to non-smokers. Tobacco raises blood pressure and damages the lining of the arteries, accelerating the development of CAD and other cardiovascular diseases. If you smoke, quit.
• High blood pressure or hypertension - The increased workload of high blood pressure overexerts the heart and damages the arteries. If you have high blood pressure, follow your physician's recommendations to lower it, including losing weight, exercising regularly, eating a low-sodium diet and taking prescribed medication.
• High cholesterol - High LDL and low HDL cholesterol increase your risk for CAD. To improve your cholesterol levels, you should eat a low-fat diet, exercise and take prescribed cholesterol medications.
• Obesity and excess weight - Excess pounds put additional stress on the heart, raise blood pressure, increase LDL cholesterol, and lower HDL cholesterol. Obesity also increases your risk for diabetes, and more than 65 percent of people with diabetes die from heart disease or stroke.
• Exercise - When you exercise regularly, you reduce the work of the heart muscle by training your bodily tissues to more efficiently extract the oxygen from the circulating blood. Regular aerobic exercise will help to reduce your risk for and may even reverse some of the adverse effects of CAD. It also can help you lose or maintain your weight, lower your blood pressure, improve your cholesterol levels, reduce stress and more.
• Stress - When you're under stress, your body produces chemicals that cause your heart to pump faster and harder, so long-term, prolonged stress raises your blood pressure. Discuss stress management techniques with your physician.
• Diabetes - Diabetes significantly increases your risk for cardiovascular disease, so maintaining your blood sugar and managing your other controllable risk factors is especially important.

Gender and CAD

If you're a man over the age of 40, you have a one in two risk of developing some form of cardiovascular disease. The good news is that men are also more likely to recover from a heart attack than women. If you're a woman of childbearing age, right now your estrogen levels are positively affecting your cholesterol levels and protecting you from heart disease. But all that will change with menopause or surgical removal of the ovaries, when your risk will rapidly increase until it equals that of men. Further complicating this factor is that women and men's symptoms of CAD and heart attack are dramatically different, and women often don't seek help until it's too late. In fact, in the U.S., one out of every two women dies from heart disease or stroke.