Coronary Artery Disease Risks You Can Change, and Those You Can't

Things that can increase your risk for coronary artery disease are called risk factors. Some risk factors, such as your gender, your age, and your family history, can't be changed. Other risk factors for heart disease are tied to your lifestyle and habits. These often are things you can change. Your chance of getting coronary artery disease rises with the number of risk factors you have.

Risk factors you may be able to change include:

• Smoking. See the Interactive Tool: How Does Smoking Increase Your Risk of Heart Attack?
• High blood pressure.
• High cholesterol.
• Diabetes.
• Obesity. See the Interactive Tool: Is Your Weight Increasing Your Health Risk?
• Lack of exercise.
• Personality factors and high stress level.
• Using birth control pills if you smoke and are older than 35 or if you have a family history of atherosclerosis or blood-clotting disorders.
• Using hormone therapy after menopause. This risk is higher for some women than others.

Smoking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and lack of exercise are risk factors you can reduce with lifestyle changes and medicine. Diabetes and obesity can sometimes be prevented when lifestyle changes are made early in life. To learn more, see the Prevention section of this topic.

Risk factors that you can't change include:

• Family history. You're more at risk if one or more of your close relatives have or had early CAD.
• Being male. Men generally develop heart disease 10 years earlier than women do. But women who have diabetes may develop heart disease at a younger age. By age 60, heart disease is one of the leading causes of death in both sexes.
• Age. People over 65 are more likely to have heart disease.

What's your risk?

Your doctor can check your risk for heart disease using screening guidelines from the American Heart Association. The guidelines include all of the things that can place you at higher risk for disease.

See the Interactive Tool: Are You at Risk for a Heart Attack? to calculate your risk of having a heart attack in the next 10 years. The tool is based on a calculator created by the National Cholesterol Education Program. It's for adults age 20 and older who do not have heart disease or diabetes.

Metabolic syndrome can also increase your risk for heart disease.⁴ People with metabolic syndrome have a group of health problems related to their metabolism, including too much fat around the waist, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, high fasting blood sugar, and low HDL cholesterol.