Want to boost your heart health right now? Want to win the anti aging fight? Then find a reason to giggle. A good belly laugh helps reduce stress hormones, which are known to damage the protective lining of your blood vessels and can lower the risk of heart disease, according to American research. It’s the least you can do for your heart, given all that it does for you.

Every three minutes, your heart pumps 5.6 litres of blood around your body — the equivalent of running a 19,000km marathon every day. During an average lifetime, your heart will beat about 2.5 million times. Yet often it powers on with less support than it deserves. Every year, heart disease claims the lives or more than 46,000 Australians. Their deaths are not only premature, but also largely preventable.

Anti aging: Heart smart

Most of us don’t think too much about heart health or the aging process until we reach our 40s and beyond and develop measurable heart problems such as elevated blood cholesterol or heart arrhythmias. Yet maximising your heart health throughout life depends on everything you do at every age and stage. Most of us begin to develop fatty buildup in our teens, so by our 20s and 30s we may have numerous plaques in our arteries and some may be growing dangerously large. This will seriously accelerate the aging process.

Do you have a parent or sibling who had a heart attack under 60 (for men) or under 65 (for women)? If the answer is yes, you may also have inherited a family risk of the disease. That doesn’t mean that developing heart problems is a given — it simply means you should be even more careful to minimise heart risk factors.

Heart disease occurs due to excess fat buildup in the arteries where it causes inflammation, which over time turns into a fatty plaque. The bigger the plaque, the higher the chance it will crack and, if it does, cause a heart attack. Then, within an hour, the artery may go from a narrowing of 25 per cent to a complete blockage. Though there are now medications that can help treat contributing factors such as elevated cholesterol, lifestyle is the best prevention. It also reduces your risk of inflammation, which is increasingly being linked to the development of a sick ticker.

Current research is examining whether inflammation may result from microbial infection, which contributes to the clogging of arteries. If so, in the future, heart disease may be treated with antibiotics and vaccines, just as we now treat the bacteria that cause ulcers with antibiotics.

Anti aging and heart health: not just a men’s disease

Heart disease is often regarded as a male condition because it occurs in men at two to three times the rate it affects women. Blame it on the male hormone, testosterone, which appears to be responsible for heart disease striking men younger and with more severity. Research at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital has shown that male hormones called androgens activate 30 genes that kickstart coronary heart disease in men. However, women are not immune, with heart disease also being their number one health risk.

It’s true that if you are pre-menopausal you are at less risk of heart attack than a man is, possibly due to the protection offered by oestrogen. But a 60per cent blockage in a woman leaves less room for the blood to get through her smaller arteries than the same blockage in a man, so women are more likely to die from a heart attack and experience more complications after a heart bypass operation.

That’s why it’s critical not to wait any longer than 15 minutes to seek medical help if you have heart attack symptoms, such as pain in the chest/shoulder/arms/neck/jaw, a cold sweat, nausea or a choking feeling in the throat. If you receive medical help within the first hour, a heart attack is less likely to prove fatal.

Regardless of your gender, at the age of 20, every man and woman should have a cholesterol check (fasting for 12 hours before the blood sample is taken). If it’s fine, continue with five-yearly checks until the age of 40, when your cholesterol should be monitored every two years. Your test should include HDL (“good” cholesterol) and LDL (“bad” cholesterol), as well as triglycerides, which if elevated, are also a significant risk factor for heart attack.

If your levels are high, lifestyle changes can very effectively reduce your risk. However, if there are strong genetic influences, you will need to talk to a doctor about it. Ask your doctor about other blood tests to check for other known heart disease markers (see box).

Clearly, what you do at every age can nurture or neglect your heart health and, in turn, increase or decrease your longevity. Below are the lifestyle issues you need to address to help keep your heart beating with vitality year after year.