What medicine should I take to prevent heart disease

There is no preventive medicine for heart disease that is suitable for everyone. Healthy low-risk people do not need to take medicine to prevent heart disease. Only people whose risk of disease is assessed by a doctor to be much higher than the risk of side effects of medicine need to take corresponding medicines as prescribed by the doctor. There is no "universal heart-protecting medicine".

Last week I went with my friend who has familial hyperlipidemia to a community hospital to get medicine. I met a 50-year-old uncle who was holding an advertising leaflet with the slogan "Nattokinase 100% Prevents Myocardial Infarction" and asked the doctor if he could stop taking statins and switch to health supplements. The doctor looked through his medical records for the past six months. According to the blood lipid report, low-density lipoprotein has been stable at 3.9mmol/L. His father had a myocardial infarction at the age of 52 and is a typical high-risk group. I persuaded him to go back on the spot. He said that if he really dared to stop statins, his blood lipids would most likely rise again within half a year. When he got really sick, no matter what health supplements he took, it would be useless.

Speaking of this, some people must be wondering, aren’t the aspirin and statins that everyone often talks about protecting the heart? Why can't you just eat it? Not to mention, even the use of aspirin, which everyone is familiar with, for primary prevention of people who have not yet suffered from heart disease has been controversial in academic circles in recent years. If you have active gastric ulcers, poor coagulation function, bruises and bruises every time you touch it, and even if your blood lipids are slightly higher, the doctor will not prescribe it to you casually. After all, the prerequisite for preventing thrombosis is not to cause massive gastrointestinal bleeding first. I met a 62-year-old aunt before. She heard from the square dancing sisters that taking aspirin could prevent myocardial infarction. She secretly bought it at a drugstore and took it for more than three months. Finally, she had black stools and went to the hospital to be diagnosed with gastric bleeding. She has had chronic gastritis for more than ten years and is not suitable for taking aspirin at all.

Actually, this is like installing anti-theft facilities at home. If your home is already in a new community with good security, and you always remember to lock the door when you go out, there is no need to carry an additional several hundred kilograms of explosion-proof door to install it. Not to mention the cost and trouble of opening the door, only those who live in old communities with poor security or have had thieves in their homes before need to upgrade the protection. The same principle applies to the prevention of heart disease. If you eat a light diet, exercise three or four times a week, have your blood pressure, blood sugar, and blood lipids all within the normal range, and have no direct relatives who have heart disease before the age of 55, you don't need to take any medicine. Instead, you take so-called heart-protecting pills and lipid-lowering health products, which will put unnecessary burden on your liver and kidneys.

Of course, if you already belong to a high-risk group after a doctor's assessment, such as having been diagnosed with high blood pressure, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, or have had myocardial infarction or cerebral infarction before, then you should take the medicines you should take according to the doctor's instructions, such as statins to adjust blood lipids, Sartan/Pril to control blood pressure, etc. Blood sugar control drugs such as metformin have been clinically proven to reduce the risk of heart disease for decades. However, the specific type and dosage you should take depends on your doctor's physical condition. Don't just reduce the dosage yourself, and don't just change the medicine based on what your neighbors say is effective.

A while ago, a reader asked me whether taking coenzyme Q10 can prevent heart disease. I specifically asked a cardiologist I know well. If you are healthy, taking it is at most a placebo. Only people who have muscle soreness as a side effect of taking statins, or people who already have myocarditis or heart failure, need to take supplements under the guidance of a doctor. Do not take auxiliary supplements as serious preventive drugs. It is a trivial matter to waste money, but it is troublesome to delay real risk intervention. If you are really not sure whether you should take medicine or not, it is more reliable to go to the cardiology department to see a doctor for a risk assessment with the physical examination reports of the last three months than to search online for a long time and listen to what others say is useful.