Health Claims

Most people who have their first heart problem already had a known risk like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, or a history of smoking in the years before it happened.

Researchers looked through medical studies from late 2024 to help doctors create new guidelines for treating high cholesterol in 2026.

This guideline is all about how doctors should check and treat people with unhealthy blood fats—like high cholesterol and triglycerides—to help prevent heart disease.

A new 2026 heart health guideline updates the rules doctors should follow to check and treat high cholesterol and other blood fat problems, replacing the old 2018 advice.

In middle-aged guys, how high the bottom number of your blood pressure is doesn’t seem to matter much for early artery thickening over four years—especially once you account for the top number, which might be more important.

For middle-aged guys, how hard your blood pushes between heartbeats might show early signs of artery hardening — even if other blood pressure numbers are accounted for.

For men in their 40s and 50s, having higher top-number blood pressure is linked to faster buildup in neck artery walls over four years, even if other risks are accounted for — suggesting that high systolic pressure matters a lot for early heart disease.

In the U.S., doctors can’t force athletes to stop playing if they have a dangerous heart condition, but in Italy, they can.

Not all college sports teams have defibrillators, especially smaller schools, and many don’t check if the devices are working.

Adding ECGs to athlete heart checks catches some problems but also gives many false alarms, leading to extra tests and stress, and it takes about 2,000 screenings to find one real heart issue.

If someone has a sudden heart stop outside the hospital and gets shocked quickly with a defibrillator by a bystander or first responder, they're nearly 4 times more likely to survive without brain damage.

In Italy, checking athletes' heart rhythms with an ECG every year has been linked to a big drop in sudden heart deaths during sports.

People who have a heart attack but don’t have typical risk factors like high blood pressure or smoking are actually more likely to go into dangerous shock—about 39% more likely—than those who do have those risks, even though they’re otherwise healthier.

People with heart attacks who don’t have a certain risk profile are less likely to get the recommended heart meds when leaving the hospital — like cholesterol drugs, blood pressure meds, and blood thinners — and that might be why they have a higher chance of dying.

People who have a heart attack but don’t have the usual risk factors like high blood pressure or smoking are actually more likely to die in the hospital than those who do have those risks — which is surprising because they seem healthier on paper.

A lot of people who have heart attacks don’t actually have the usual risk factors like high blood pressure, smoking, or diabetes—so our current ways of predicting heart problems might be missing something important.

Almost everyone has at least one heart disease risk factor before they get sick — like high blood pressure or cholesterol — no matter their age or gender. For women under 60, it's a bit less common, but still very high.

Most people already have two or more common heart disease risk factors—like high blood pressure or cholesterol—before they ever have a heart attack, stroke, or heart failure, according to big studies in Korea and the U.S.

Almost everyone who has a stroke had at least one common heart risk factor like high blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, or a history of smoking—so strokes hardly ever happen to people with perfectly healthy heart numbers.

Almost everyone who gets heart failure already had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, or smoked—very few people get it without any of these common risk factors.

Almost everyone who had their first heart attack already had at least one common risk factor like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, or a history of smoking—this was true for nearly all people in big studies from Korea and the U.S.

Some countries like South Korea, Canada, and Iceland do a great job treating high blood pressure, with most people getting help and keeping it under control. But in many places in Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific, fewer than 1 in 4 people get treatment, and even fewer have it under control.

Blood pressure treatment got better in most countries over the past few decades, especially in wealthier places and some middle-income ones like Costa Rica and Brazil — showing that improving care for high blood pressure is possible almost anywhere.

Most people around the world who have high blood pressure aren’t getting it under control, even though treatments exist — which puts them at higher risk for heart problems.