How You Can Prevent Heart Attack? The Signs and Symptoms You Shouldn't Ignore | Dr. Ami Bhatt | #171

**Ami Bhatt** (0:00)
Heart disease is the number one killer of women. It kills more women than all cancers combined. Most importantly, it is largely preventable.

**Vonda Wright** (0:10)
Today, I have Ami Bhatt, who is a Yale-trained cardiologist, a leader in the field of innovation, clinical cardiology, and frankly, whole-person lifelong care.

**Ami Bhatt** (0:22)
The most important thing for women is to trust your own symptoms and what your body is telling you.

**Vonda Wright** (0:28)
How do we do that?

**Ami Bhatt** (0:29)
You need to know your blood pressure, and I don't mean once a year. The second is you should know your full cholesterol panel. I need to know what I'm dealing with so that I can start to make tiny adjustments rather than find out too late. You are putting yourself in the driver's seat.

**Vonda Wright** (0:42)
Right. Have a plan. What are the things from you as an expert cardiologist are non-negotiable from lifestyle?

**Ami Bhatt** (0:48)
I would like you to walk if you can. You can walk inside your house and do circles. You can do squats, body weight squats. A week from now, I want everybody listening to be like, yeah, this is my cholesterol and my blood pressure usually runs this. If you can do that for me and then you can get up and walk 10 minutes a couple of times a day at a minimum, you're going to have a heart healthy life.

**Vonda Wright** (1:14)
I just want to take the time to thank you all for being here with us at the Dr Vonda podcast. You are smart, you are curious, you are generous, and you have turned the Sleepy Podcast into consistently ranking in the top 5, 6, 7 of all medicine podcasts across the world. We are currently in the top 100 of all health and wellness podcasts across the world, and I'm thankful. I want you to keep sharing with everybody you love, with everybody who needs to hear our guests, and I want you to subscribe every single month, more than 135,000 people listen to this podcast, and we have educated millions of people over time.
I want you to subscribe so you never miss an episode. I want you to follow this podcast on all the platforms, and if you want to see the videos, you need to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Thanks for being here on the Dr Vonda Podcast. The best is yet to come. So welcome back to The Dr Vonda Show, and today's topic is so important to you, and we're going to get to why that is, but it's really important to me because there are some families that can trace their family history and say, my family dies of cancer.
In my family, for multiple generations, we can trace back to my family dies of heart disease or the sequelae of vessels getting clogged up. And so this is not only a very important topic for all of you listening, but really important for me and my family. So today, I have Ami Bhatt, who is a Yale-trained cardiologist. She is a leader in the field of innovation, clinical cardiology, and frankly, whole-person lifelong care. She works not only at the local level, has been at huge academic centers, Harvard, but really is one of the voices leading how we treat heart disease in this country through her work advising the FDA. Not as a government employee, but as a key leader of thought leadership in this area. So Dr. Bhatt, I'm so glad to have you here today. We are just going to open the entire can of worms, if you will, on heart disease in women and what we need to know. Offline, I was saying to you, I really think heart disease needs a better PR campaign when it comes to women, right?

**Ami Bhatt** (3:59)
That's right, that's right.

**Vonda Wright** (4:00)
If you just believed what you saw, and as a former cancer nurse, my first career, I have nothing against the wonderful PR and marketing that the American Cancer Society has done elevating. But here's the reality, right? Talk to us about the fact that for men and women, heart disease is the number one killer.

**Ami Bhatt** (4:21)
First of all, thank you for having me, and thank you to your audience for taking the time to listen to what we're talking about today. It really does affect everyone.
I'm going to start with a chip on my shoulder. You might as well start there, because you brought it up, which is the oncology chip on the shoulder.
It's amazing, pink ribbon campaign, breast cancer, American Cancer Society, they've done a great job. We at the American Heart Association, American College of Cardiology, also work on that. What we haven't managed to help people understand is that heart disease is, first of all, the number one killer of women. Second of all, it kills more women than all cancers combined.