Hello, can you hear the birds singing? Oh my goodness, I'm recording a short series of videos for midlife women on stress and the way that stress in our 21st century, which we can avoid, by the way, affects us our bodies and our minds affects us, holistically moving into our later years. I promised that I would talk about heart disease. This is one of my major passions, because despite all of the science and all the research and development around heart disease, and what I mean by heart disease, is the propensity for things like cardiovascular accidents like heart attack, stroke, probably embolus, but also heart long term chronic heart disease as well. Heart disease is still the biggest killer In the Western world, it accounts for one in 2.4 deaths. So one in 2.4 of us in the Western world will die of heart disease.

Only three people survive their first heart attack, three out of 10 people swipe left is offset. And very often these heart attacks come with no warning at all. So you may be like me and no people or no people that know people that have suddenly had a stroke or a heart attack, or a bleed on the brain and they looked fit, they appear to be happy they appeared to be the last person that you would think of that would suffer either a fatal or non fatal cardiovascular accident. I was with my young hairdresser not so so long ago, and she was telling me that one Saturday afternoon she went home to visit her mother and found her on the kitchen floor who had suffered a devastating stroke. Now this lady has survived, but the quality of her life is very poor. She is a mere 54 years old.

And you would never have thought that she would have been at risk. Because you see, we can't tell from the outside, can we? What's going on in the inside. But what we do know is that stress has a major impact on your risk of heart disease. And this is because stress those high levels of those hormones that we've been talking about, cause inflammation in the body. And if you have arteries that are lovely and open and clear, as you did when you're in your 20s, it means that the blood can flow to and from where it needs to get to.

But as we get older, we have things that get in the way of those arteries becoming open and lovely and smooth. So we have cholesterol buildup and plaque buildup and calcium buildup. And what happens is that if we are stressed, we then produce inflammation and that inflammation, those little bits of information gets stuck to the plaque and the cholesterol. And it's that little bit that inflammatory particle that's in your cell in the in the inner lining of your blood cell that will form a clot and that is the cloth that will travel to your brain. So you have a stroke that will travel to your lung, you have a permanent bus with and this is what my month we know my story, you know that my mother died at 56 have a pulmonary embolus or indeed will travel to your heart and this causes a heart attack.

So reducing your stress levels is super, super important. And ladies Did you know after the after your menopause, so postmenopausal, you are at risk of heart attack slightly more than men so the risk goes up to 54% for women and 48% for men, and we tend to think of these kind of things. As a man's disease, but actually women postmenopausal V, we are more at risk because we haven't got the estrogen in our bodies that protect ourselves from developing this inflammation. So it's really important that we manage our stress levels so that we are less risk of cardiovascular disease. That's my that's my thought for today. I'll catch you on the next video.

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