For the benefit of those who are unable to read due to the popup wall:
> The biggest risk factors are high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, and obesity, all of which can clog and damage the arteries and blood vessels that carry oxygen-rich blood to the heart.
> While some of these conditions may be genetic, more often they’re brought on by years of unhealthy habits like poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle that typically begin early in childhood
> COVID is known to activate inflammatory responses in the body and make blood thicker and stickier, Yang said, which can make infected people more susceptible to blood clots that can clog arteries and lead to heart attack. However, it’s still not clear why younger adults appear to be more vulnerable to COVID’s cardiovascular complications.
> The AHA recommends following “Life’s Essential 8”: key measures that, if practiced, can improve and maintain your cardiovascular health. These include a healthy diet, regular physical activity, no tobacco smoking, and sufficient sleep, as well as managing your weight, cholesterol, blood sugar, and blood pressure.
Anyone on here have advice on this? I eat primarily vegan and run for at least an hour a day (70-90km/wk), have a resting heart rate in the low 40s, have good (middle of healthy range) cholesterol, blood glucose, and A1C, and yet my blood pressure is persistently in the 130-140 over 70 range. I can’t figure out how to get the top number down and my doctor just sort of shrugs that it’s nothing to worry about but I suspect this is less about the science (which seems to support even lower than 120/80 is healthier) and more due to the baseline blood pressures he sees have been increasing over time due to obesity, inactivity, poor diets, etc.
Anyone in a similar boat who has managed to achieve improvements?
I have the same problem and so does my dad. Since you have everything zipped up, there's good reason to assume it's genetic.
You can squeeze a few more points of BP by losing weight if you aren't already bottomed out. While it was the last intervention I tried, going from 20-25% to 15% body fat dropped my systolic 10pts consistently. When I go back to 20% BF, I'm back up 10pts of systolic. It's very sensitive.
The first reason I went plant-based was to optimize my cholesterol since it felt like the only lever I could pull since I'm already jacked and thin. If I'm going to hover around 125/70, I figure I might as well have optimal cholesterol, and I definitely was able to really shrink my LDL (ApoB).
I realized I'm sensitive to sodium. I've mostly replaced sodium salt with potassium salt. But I also noticed that caffeine can add 10 points to the top BP number even a day later. My best BP numbers have been when I've avoided caffeine and sodium for 48 hours.
I've considered experimenting with BP meds but never was motivated enough to pull the trigger.
Hey I really appreciate the comment on Caffeine. I have been talking my measurements in the morning before having coffee, assuming 24 hours without caffeine would be sufficient to eliminate the effect but perhaps I am a slow metabolizer too and should try going without coffee for a few days and seeing if that changes anything.
For body fat, are you doing Dexa scans or how do you measure? My bathroom scale spits out numbers but I doubt they are trustworthy.
The magnesium glycinate is good for your bowels too. I take Magnesium L-Threonate and I think it helps. And in general, ER doctors add Magnesium intravenously when people have a hypertensive crisis.
I dealt with something similar, struggled for years wondering why no dietary intervention would touch my systolic which would sit around 125-130 over 60.
As hard as it was I finally ditched caffeine which instantly dropped my systolic down to the 110-115 range. Also feel much better overall. I wasn't even consuming an egregious amount either, always limiting myself to a max of 400mg, typically in the range of 250mg a day.
Another commenter mentioned caffeine. I have been taking my BP measurements in the morning before having a coffee, but perhaps I am a slow metabolizer and the effects linger for a few days. I am going to listen to you and the other commenter and try ditching caffeine to see what impact this has on my BP over several days. We’ll see! Thanks!
I'm in the same boat as you. My diet is mainly Mediterranean, and blood tests show no abnormalities (I do it 1-2 times yearly). I don't exercise but score 250-400 Heart Points weekly by walking or intense hiking. I firmly believe that stress is a primary factor in hypertension. If you are an anxious person, maybe even more so. Another factor to blame can be loneliness; still hoping for credible research that shows any correlation.
Unfortunately, I don't see a path to eat, meditate or exercise out of it if you in the good shape already. But controlling sodium intake can help to offset some numbers. To control it, I take medications and must continue taking them permanently.
I have a feeling you're probably right about stress and HT.
I strongly believe everyone needs to lift weights. For me it helps with stress. It's a great way to funnel all the days work BS out of your body.
I feel super energized and at the top of the world, even after a quick 20 minute session.
As people get older and they lose muscle/bone density they have a habit of falling down and breaking things, so it's never to late to start. That's my main long term concern.
Exercising helps, no doubt. I see it as good stress, controlled stress that trains your body to deal with bad stress. There are other ways too. I get the same level of excitement when I take cold showers.
My back prevents me from lifting weights again. But I'm happy for those who can and do it.
I’ve been vegan for over 11 years, but my blood pressure has been a problem for a long time. Heart disease and high blood pressure runs in my family. My weight is fine. I walk about 4 miles a day. My CT calcium score is 0. My cholesterol is fantastic. I don’t smoke, I don’t use other drugs, I don’t use caffeine. Sodium is a big issue with me, but even when I keep it under 1500mg, BP is still too high. Alcohol is also a factor. It’s bad when I drink, but even when I go sober for a month it still just isn’t “normal”. One challenge is that no drinking, strict diet (particularly the sodium), etc. all at once is absolutely miserable to follow. I’m also a high stress and anxiety type of person with trouble sleeping. Perhaps correlating blood pressure with good sleep and less perceived stress would yield some insight there.
Admittedly, I am inconsistent in high intensity exercise. So in addition to improving that, I’d like to try the wall squats and planks in the recent articles others have mentioned.
My doctor has repeatedly had to remind me that there’s no shame or loss in having to take medication to control it, as long as I’m doing my best with all the other stuff. A low dose of atenolol sets me right (although I don’t like that it limits your heart rate). I’m currently trying lisinopril, doesn’t seem to work as well. I would still prefer to be off BP meds and I hope those other improvements will work, but using meds is better than letting high blood pressure run uncontrolled.
Recently I lowered my blood pressure to acceptable levels with a combination of
- lower stress
- DASH diet with low carbs in evenings
- 1,5 grams Omega3 from seaweed oil per day
- lower salt intake even more
Haven’t tried isometric exercises yet, but do exercise more (intense) than you seem to do. Drink low amounts (15grams beans) of top quality coffee, haven’t tried ditching it as suggested elsewhere in this thread. As I’m low on animal proteins, getting 25grams of a good combination of proteins per meal can be difficult, especially as I consider a good meal part of the pleasures of social life.
Get your doc to check your potassium/sodium levels. If your sodium is on the high end, and potassium low: check your aldosterone levels.
I had that, turned out to be an adenoma on my adrenal gland that was flooding me with aldosterone. That’s a hormone That controls your k/na balance - which controls your bp.
You’re running for fun/challenge, not for health. It’s not a surprise that your health isn’t improving. A single 10km run per week in 1h aiming for 40min, an interval run sprinting as hard as possible and casual short runs in between will improve your numbers while also not overexerting your body.
Something that's pretty easy and beneficial is to regularly donate blood, also helps to clear out things like heavy metal build up, although you might need to be careful of getting low in some like iron.
AFAIR, 'someone' changed that in the nineties down from 28. For whatever reason. Furthermore BMI does not discriminate between muscle mass, bone mass, and fat mass.
And to top that, it does not disriminate between male & female.
It is a completely overrated value, IMHO doing more harm than having beneficial use cases.
I will note that my BMI is 25 and i have a 6 pack. It's not perfect and really is just a rough guide. But i guess its a moot point since bodybuilders are already aware of that.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "works", but to my untrained eye BMI doesn't work especially well for individuals in general. It was designed to measure large populations using routinely collected statistical data, not to inform individual lifestyle and medical decisions. These days we have much more effective methods to evaluate metabolic and cardiovascular health instead of using a metric that's a proxy of a proxy, but calculating BMI and applying a (largely arbitrary) label is dirt-cheap by comparison to all of those; it requires no special expertise, expensive equipment, time-consuming procedure, or thoughtful analysis.
It also doesn't work if you're at all far outside of the average height. This is fine for population level statistics (which is what BMI is for) but not for individual health measures. If I were to be on the lower end of "healthy" BMI I would be severely malnourished.
There's a growing movement claiming saturated fats(coconut, palm, animal) are not as bad as once thought and that high levels of polyunsaturated fatty acid(like Omega-6) found in seed oils(canola, soybean, sunflower, etc) are very bad. Hopefully we can get more research into this.
Any kind of food can be harmful when eaten in excess, even when it is required for surviving, but in smaller quantities.
Oils with high content of linoleic acid (omega-6), like cold-pressed sunflower oil (which is also very rich in vitamin E) are very healthy in smaller quantities, e.g. 15 to 20 milliliter per day, but they can become harmful in too large quantities, e.g. more than 50 milliliter per day.
For instance, a combination of 50 milliliter per day of EV olive oil with 20 milliliter per day of cold-pressed sunflower oil gives a fatty acid profile that is close to optimal, according to the current knowledge.
Eating only olive oil would require a much greater quantity of oil for providing enough linoleic acid and vitamin E, which would provide too many calories for a sedentary lifestyle.
Eating only sunflower oil in an amount enough to provide an adequate fraction of the daily calories would provide too much linoleic acid.
So only a mixture can satisfy all criteria.
With saturated fats, the effects are similar, in smaller quantities they are healthy, but in large quantities they can be harmful. Olive oil, avocado oil and various kinds of nuts, e.g. almonds, hazelnuts, cashew, pistachio and a few others have a good balance between oleic acid and saturated fats.
The only links I've been able to find on Google that mention canola oil and macular degeneration say canola oil helps slow or prevent macular degeneration.
> COVID is known to activate inflammatory responses in the body and make blood thicker and stickier
The mechanism that causes this is the spike protein (this is well studied now), and applies - perhaps not equally - to COVID infection and COVID immunization
Yes, the manufacturer's own biodistribution studies showed that it was detectable in the spleen, kidneys, ovaries, testicles, and bone marrow etc until at least 48h after. At the end of the study, some markers were still increasing but they didn't bother to find out when it peaked and declined.
Note that this is in complete opposition to the original claims during the vaccine campaign that the vaccine stayed local in the arm.
Telling young people it's OK to be fat is very bad. I know it's wrong to criticize someone over their looks but people have to be realistic. At some point it's like the story "The Emperor's New Clothes".
My parents said almost no one was rotund in their day and anyone was was probably bullied relentlessly. Not a good social condition to be in.
Semaglutide, metformin, and gastric bypasses help as bandaids to the problem of a shift in the corporate food supply chain but aren't panaceas. Olestra was a flop. And nothing can change that excess calories makes for an easy life of a cancer cell. (I suspect we evolved to depend on the cellular stresses of periodic famine and caloric restriction to kill cancer cells much like the way some chemotherapy protocols halt cell division.)
Within 20-40 years, food will gradually become unaffordable and calories scarce as crops fail worldwide and turns to desert. I suspect many people will become farmers and do so indoors, with limited vertical farming tech.
The final destination: the big bone'd will likely be the last still standing if they're in otherwise good health. This is inevitable without major geoengineering now.
> Mounting evidence shows that more young adults are experiencing heart problems compared to decades past, and that worsening lifestyle habits—namely, poor diet and lack of exercise—are to blame. And some research suggests that COVID infections are adding insult to injury.
> Perhaps the most alarming trend is that, despite declines among older adults, the proportion of heart attacks among younger adults is increasing across the globe—which many doctors who spoke to National Geographic consider a public health emergency. (Young adults are loosely defined as those between 20 to 50 years old.)
COVID is much more than an "insult to injury". There are more and more studies published every year regarding the cardiovascular complications associated with it in young adults. Speaking from experience of "long hauling" for 2+ years and likely having a mild case of myocarditis from an acute infection, I live most waking days with uncomfortable chest pressure and anxiety-inducing heart palpitations. Not very normal for a 31-year old man who eats well, exercises regularly, doesn't smoke/drink, and manages stress more than most. You can follow the essential 8 all you want, but COVID has serious implications here.
Young adults spend more time sitting around on their computer and eating junk food. No shock heart attacks are rising. With hotter climates I expect this trend to continue as going outside becomes less palatable.
No shock smart phones and generally accessible computers came with the dawn of the millennium and that's when things started to get bad.
Yes it is. In the 80s if you were bored, the solution was to go play with your friends, go run around in the creek, etc. People weren't in better shape because they had ironclad discipline.
Contrast to now: You're bored? Welp just sit right here on your ass and there is a literally bottomless bucket of entertainment that frankly is a lot more immediately satisfying than most of the stuff outside your house. And if you dare venture outside your house? Make sure you bring your parents because, increasingly often in the US, they can get arrested for child endangerment.
You know you're talking about a normal American life (miles?) when you mention drivers dropping people off at grocery stores and walking to/from the train.
Where I grew up in Arizona (not rural at all), there was literally nowhere to go within a 15min walk.
Of course they can and they do. But the point is that across the board, healthy societies are those that don't have to "introduce exercise" to their lives. (Mild) exercise is baked into their lifestyle as a byproduct of how they've organized their social lives and especially their built environments.
A public health solution that has "Step 1: Assume people have the time, energy, and discipline to introduce exercise into their daily lives" is not going to work. It really is that simple - that's not how any healthy society works.
FWIW I do think you're sharing good advice and it would solve a lot of problems if people listened to it, but the reality is this advice has been around forever. It doesn't actually make a dent where people need it most: default sedentary, car-ridden, non-health conscious parts of the country.
>Step 1: Assume people have the time, energy, and discipline to introduce exercise into their daily lives" is not going to work. It really is that simple - that's not how any healthy society works.
I'm struggling to respond to this, probably because you might be right. The cynical view of this, is that you can't help people that don't want to help themselves. i.e. Horse-water, leading.
The capitalistic meat grinder will get as much money from them as possible.
Inevitably, they will get sick, pay for outrageous priced miracle drugs (like Ozempic) or for other aliments that could be preventable and eventually die.
A bit incongruous that they blame poor diet and lack of excercise, and then feature the case of Bronny James, an athlete raised in a very wealthy family.
What's incongruous about saying the vast majority of incidences are (probably) related to obviously bad lifestyle and also yes it can happen at a lower rate to just about anyone?
Go take a walk near any elementary/middle school in America and tell me you're shocked that we're seeing increased rates of heart disease among young people. The kids are totally screwed. They're abused by a society that feeds them garbage, keeps them sitting all day long, and makes it impossible for them to walk to a friend's house and play in the street.
If you walk past schools in higher end neighborhoods in wealthy states like California, you'll notice that far far children fewer have this issue. For example in SF and LA, I see very little adult or childhood obese people from casual observation, then when I return home to Illinois, it's shocking. People look afflicted. And this is coming from a not-skinny person, 6 foot, 190 odd lbs. I'm no picture of health.
By and large, the issue seems to be confined to the south and cornfed middle states who have an absolute explosion of childhood obesity. And it seems to have some association with some combination of factors of money, weather, and urbanism, but I don't know how/why.
I've noticed in most of the country, fast food is what it is and eating just one meal makes me feel shitty and lethargic, but on the west coast (Washington, Idaho, California for my sampling) I'm convinced they ban or just don't use certain ingredients (lard?). I can eat way more than I even meant to and not even notice.
Way back in time I used to work at McDonald's. When I started working there, they used lard (beef tallow) in the fryers. This is what made the original McDonalds fries soo good. But there was growing outcry about saturated fat in the 1980s, and under pressure they switched over to using vegetable oil. Unless something has changed, the oil does not contain trans-fats, and the McDonald's nutrition website[1] supports this, but it definitely does not produce the same taste or texture of french fry.
Of course what local restaurants use will vary wildly. Some will use high quality oil and some will use the cheapest food-grade oil they can find that has managed to get FDA/USDA approval (not sure which agency supervises that).
I think the issue is much more obvious and alarming in those areas, but really our perceptual baseline has moved a lot. This does affect everyone and will continue to affect even more people if unaddressed.
No it's not. They clearly highlighted that SCA is an electrical problem, and MI is a plumbing problem. They just used it to point out that perhaps people will now start paying attention to heart diseases in those younger than 40.
Look at the abundance of comments on COVID and the lack of walkable cities.
Own your shitty lifestyle. I make poor health choices all the time. It's bad for me and it makes me feel bad about myself. But it's on me. Nobody forced me. I acknowledge and own the decisions.
Using a lack of a "walkable city" as an excuse is pathetic. You can exercise in a tiny room if needed. You can drive to a gym. Or just to a park. Or to a national park. At work you can take the stairs. I live in a country 15 times denser than the US so don't tell me you don't have space to move around.
What would be your next excuse if you would have a walkable city? Obesity is OK because Twitter said so?
There's no excuse for your crap diet and inactive lifestyle. Is it impossibly hard to change? Yes, I totally feel that. But start by owning it.
Think of it this way. We are all accumulating plaque. Three things play a large role in the rate at which we accumulate plaque: bodyweight, diet, activity level. (Yes, I'm aware there are more variables, but these are most pervasive and influential)
It used to be that we managed these variables quite well until middle age. Now, we flout them at an early age, setting the course for early heart attacks.
Through the maintenance of ideal CV risk factors and lifestyle behaviors. Once the atherosclerosis advances to the point of being fibrotic or scarred, it becomes harder/perhaps impossible to reverse that physical condition, but even then, if you can't quite restore the tissue damage, you can restore your health back to previous levels as your body adapts to its new form.
Very similar possibilites/outcomes are also observed in lungs when people quit smoking, and in the liver when people change their lifestyle or stop drinking.
It seems information dense, but I don't see their point.
Glad they talk about arythmia. This slowly killed my endurance and sleep training (I wanted to be a skipper) and it was too late to do anything about it. Still got the memo in time to change course without trouble, but young people should always get their heart checked.
Still have no idea why I developed arythmia though.
The relationship between certain endurance training and arrhythmia seems to follow a J-curve.
No activity = higher risk //
Moderate activity = lowest risk //
Extreme activity = higher risk that increases with # of training hours
There's a few mechanisms: cardiac remodeling due to pressure and load, fibrosis, and vagal tone
This happened to me after years of 60-100 mile weeks combined with competitive weightlifting and rock climbing. Symptoms showed up, I got diagnosed, then received an ablation which solved the issue. I'm back to a high level but don't push it like I used to. Was probably doing >1500 training hours/year. Now I'm closer to 800-1000/year
I experienced light-headedness when going to sleep (3 time a day, for 2 hours, and I trained 45 minutes rest too at the time, so quite often). I could have felt something was wrong.
But truly, I had to get a physical check to get my sport license (it's mandatory and free in my country), and I had a new doctor who really checked me, told me about it and to stop intensive efforts, weird sleep patterns and keep doing endurance sport. Sadly I forgot about the last part after a while.
Not OP, but this is the sort of thing that should surface from yearly physicals. Ask your doctor to give you an EKG if this is something that you're concerned about.
In some cases, when EKG shows some signs, the cardiologist can prescribe wearing a Holter monitor for a day that records your heart activity. It will show how many beats are abnormal and the overall state.
My wife with Long Covid has sudden rises up to 150 while resting. Before that she had a rather low rate and she was totally healthy.
I wouldn’t rule out that a lot of people around might have some of the Long Covid symptoms like the heart issues without the severity of my wife, so they are not really sick but still suffer related problems
For all the technological progress we have made, it appears data collection about our own health is stuck in last century.
I wish, measuring all the health parameters would have been dirt cheap and simple. Why do I even need a doctor's certificate to get my blood tested at Labcorp ? It is really all beyond me.
The worst sort of "elephant in the room" journalism -- everything is to blame, but that obvious thing that everyone took leading to an enormous, never-seen-before statistical anomaly. But it's not that thing. We're sure.
I presume you mean the pandemic? I've had a similar complaint on a lot of analysis lately. People are looking to blame a ton of the previous few years trends in terms of anything but that. It is very weird.
The study in the article tracks young adults from 2000 to 2016 and was published in 2019. It entirely predates the existence of COVID-19 vaccines. Please stick with facts instead of what you 'feel' is true.
Are you attributing the decade-long annual 2% increase in heart attacks among young people to the COVID vaccine?
> A study of more than 2,000 young adults admitted for heart attack between 2000 and 2016 in two U.S. hospitals found that 1 in 5 were 40 years old or younger—and that the proportion of this group has been increasing by 2 percent each year for the last decade.
But anyway, yes COVID itself is also a potential culprit and yeah, the vaccines also should be monitored closely. In fact both are analyzed every day for this type of signal. Please publish a paper if you found some (not gleaned from the vibes around popular news articles).
Sigh Here we go again. I'm sure this post will not stir up yet /another/ post of straight arguing in the comments.
How can it seemingly never be acknowledged following the pandemic that young people do, on occasion, have freak events such as cardiac arrest for reasons not related to the vaccine? There are plenty of cases that predate the vaccines. Is it also too hard to suppose that maybe heart disease doesn't necessarily discriminate based on age for people who eat like crap and never exercise?
Agreed. I was going to point that out as well but a few other comments addressed the dating of the sources so I instead just wanted to address the people who read the title and were ready to jump into the comments to beat a dead horse.
See, this is what I love about the internet. It channels the best of the "ancient curses": "the curse in disguise" ... "the poisoned chalice"*. I guess, it's a sort of "Artifact of Doom", as tvtropes.org, handily accessible through the very same, renders it.
I remember "here we go again" VERY well, from the 90s. There are probably people here who remember it from the 80s and before, on the internet (of course, disregarding earlier iterations that, granted, could not provide the speed, volume, intensity, etc. of our "greatest" communications tech to date**).
The Internet is reminiscent of "The One Ring", "The Ring of Gyges"***, and also, "The Mask (of Loki)" (as characterized in "The Mask", that Jim Carrey movie from the 90s). It has that mixture of addictiveness / fascination, particularly to those who seek power / influence****. And, like each of the objects just mentioned, it amplifies (and sometimes outright twists) the internals of individuals. Even those who "should know better" give in to the dark impulses of ego / id ... in the heat of a fight.
There's a saying from far earlier days to the effect of "flamewars bring a lot of heat, but very little light". The great thing is, there's always "a new sucker", and now we have "Nation State actors", "Advanced Persistent Threats", and whole new categories of that good old-fashioned "rhetoric" (really, rhetorical "spanking the monkey") that haunts human existence, spreading like a cancer OF cancer.
... Every blessing a curse, I guess. Pretty much guaranteed that continual rolls of the dice will eventually result in "snake eyes". I'd better stop writing before things get too biblical, hahaha... hard not to think of Carlin, at least, to close: https://youtu.be/b9fmjHeRh4k
** A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila - Mitch Ratcliffe
*** Plato, a sort of ancestor of Tolkien's version (no idea off the top of my head if it influenced his or not ... Tolkien also has been argued not to have been influenced by development of nuclear weapons per se, though nuclear weapons certainly fit the metaphor - would be "The One Ring" of "The Atomic Age", IMO / fairly clearly)
**** How often do I think the name "Wormtongue" when reading something I come across on this network of networks ... and, toady or fool, the cause matters little
Turning off Javascript works for avoiding the paywall and enabling you to actually read the article. (Though their prices are actually reasonable if wanted to support Nat Geo)
My brain was moving too fast, and I assumed that "turning off javascript" was going to be about avoiding heart attacks, somehow. Set me up for a very different expectation going into this article. :D
Your comment makes no sense. The article blames Covid for a sudden increase:
> A 2022 study published in the Journal of Medical Virology found that heart attack deaths increased by 14 percent within the first year of the pandemic.
So if I were to blame the 14% increase on the vaccine instead, sources predating the pandemic wouldn't matter.
I mean, "within the first year of the pandemic" presumably means "between Jan 2020 and Jan 2021", and the vaccines didn't become widely available [to all people 16 and older] until Apr 2021, so I wouldn't blame that 14% increase on the vaccine.
I'm just saying: The original comment made it sound like (in the context of "heart attacks are rising"), as if any increase within the pandemic is already (or mostly...) covered by sources predating the pandemic and thus drawing any link to the vaccine would be invalid. These (wrong!) hand-holding statements annoy me, that's all.
To the data: Not sure what period the study is about. Though it's well known, that MRNA vaccines cause heart related problems. Whether the rise in excess death of young people is caused by "long covid"-effects, and/or by the vaccine, is still an open question I guess. But it's a fact, that the pandemic has a long-term impact on peoples health and excess death: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
> mRNA-1273 vaccine-associated myocardial injury was more common than previously thought, being mild and transient, and more frequent in women versus men.
"Mild and transient" does not describe a heart attack.
It's an interesting phenomena to watch some folks go from 'it stays in your upper arm and tells you body how to fight covid', to 'elevation of markers of myocardial injury occurred in about one out of 35 persons" is completely fine.
Obviously any form of heart damage increases the chances of heart attacks in the future. The heart is extremely poor at repairing itself.
