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Lecture Notes

This final slide shows the non-modifiable, or the factors that we cannot change that are major risk factors for cardiovascular disease, and the first of these is increasing age, or getting older. Most deaths from cardiovascular disease occur in those who are greater than 65 years old. We also know that males are more likely, at least before women go through menopause, to develop cardiovascular disease, and so we think that hormones might play a role, because as women age and go through menopause, their risk of cardiovascular disease becomes about the same as males, and so some people think that potentially estrogen has a protective effect over females until they lose their estrogen as they go through menopause. And finally, heredity and race, so if someone in your immediate family had heart disease—your parents, your siblings—that puts you at a greater risk, and also we know that African American and Mexican Americans, compared to Caucasian Americans, have higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease. So these are three things, unlike the other factors that we talked about, these three you don't have any control over changing these. We know we're going to age, we're born one biological sex or another, and we're born into a particular heredity and race, all of which we cannot change. But the good news is that we talked about many factors, many lifestyle factors that we can change to help reduce our risk of developing cardiovascular disease, which is a major killer of Americans, adult Americans, in the United States today.