Maintaining your heart muscle mass
As you age, maintaining your heart health may be a matter of running just to stay even.
New research has singled out how aging, on its own, is a risk factor for heart failure. Up until now, this has been a challenge to measure.
Researchers looked at over half a dozen measurements of how the heart is structured and how it pumps blood. Their study included over 5,000 men and women between the ages of 45 and 84 who were not already suffering any heart disease.
Using an MRI capable of measuring the minute muscle changes in the heart with each beat, they found what seems to be a correlation between age and the amount of time that elapses between squeezes and contractions.
This means that the heart is trying that much harder to maintain its ability to pump efficiently. Translation? Less blood is getting pumped through.
The research should lead to changes in testing for heart failure. Current tests don't take into account the fact that heart muscle mass declines each year by about 0.3 grams. Based on a test today, the actual ratios being used to assess heart function are flawed—and could give a false sense of security in your heart health.
So how do you stop the aging factor that's slowing down pumping action and shrinking muscle? Look to healthy lifestyle choices. Start with analyzing your diet. Is it long on fast-food burgers and fries and short on heart-healthy fatty fish, grains, fruits and vegetables? Try following a heart-healthy, Mediterranean-style diet, which includes plenty of the latter variety of foods.
And you need to get moving, if you aren't already. Talk to your doctor and tell him your plan is to keep your heart muscle strong. A walking regimen is easy enough for anyone to stick with, even if you have to start out with just a few steps per day and build from there.
I also recommend you add strength training—a healthy habit that provides overall strengthening and stabilizing benefits, even so far as to reduce your risk of falling and fracturing something. Research shows quite dramatically that nothing assures healthy, graceful aging like regular strength training, and it also builds your heart muscle.
You don't have to get fancy or join a gym. Go to your kitchen cupboard right now. Have any canned goods? Great—they make the perfect hand-held weights. You can start with the small tomato paste cans and work up to the larger cans of green beans! Better yet—if you have a local Y or community center, I recommend you join and get involved in a strength-training program.
