Heart disease is a range of conditions that affect your heart (the fist sized organ pumping blood around your body) or the vessels (the tubes the blood is pumped through). This can include: coronary heart disease (narrowing or furring up of these vessels making it harder to pump blood and oxygen around your body), hypertension (high blood pressure), Angina (chest pain usually with exercise) etc. These can all lead to heart attacks or even strokes.

Men are more likely to develop heart disease than women and at a younger age. Around 700,000 people in Scotland currently live with heart disease.

There are a number of risk factors that increase your likelihood of developing heart disease, these are:
• Smoking
• Alcohol
• Being overweight / obese
• Stress
• High blood pressure / high blood cholesterol
• Diabetes
• Positive family history
• History of clots
• Ethnic background
• Being male
• Age (more likely as you increase with age)

• Chest pain (if you are having 10/10 central crushing chest pain that may radiate to your jaw or down your left arm, call 999)
• Pain, weakness or numb legs or arms
• Breathlessness
• Palpitations (very fast) or very slow heart beat
• Feeling dizzy, light headed or faint
• Fatigue
• Swollen limbs (usually legs)

Preventing heart disease is possible through lifestyle modification to reduce risk factors. Most of these can be reduced with:
• Eating a balanced health diet (See more here)
• Exercising often (150 minutes moderate physical activity a week)
• Quitting smoking 
• Reducing alcohol consumption 

1. NHS Scotland
2. British Heart Foundation