Imagine you head to your primary care doctor for a routine checkup, asks you a series of questions about how you’ve been feeling, performs a few routines, and maybe wants to talk about the results of your recent blood test.

Your visit ends with the healthcare practitioner referring you to a heart specialist Singapore and urging you to make an appointment to talk about your heart. Should you be worried? Not necessarily.

In this simple guide, we take you through some of the common reasons physicians refer patients to heart specialists in Singapore.

Established Diseases

Many patients referred to cardiologists in Singapore are older people, with a history of things like heart attacks, congestive heart failure, or a trial fibrillation. Men are typically at high risk for these events a decade earlier than women. While they strike every age, they tend to be worse as women get older than 60 years of age. In the post-menopausal age, they catch their male counterparts.

Risk Factors

A host of risk factors such as high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels, being diabetic or smoking are all grounds for a referral to a heart specialist Singapore. So are things like obese or overweight, a lack of physical activity and an unhealthy diet.

Pregnancy Complications

Pregnancy-related complications such as gestational diabetes or preeclampsia are widely known to increase the risk of future cardiac complications. Women in general have a very wide array and wide range of symptoms that could mimic other conditions, and it could be more related to the heart.

If this is not enough, women often present more complex symptoms that can be challenging to diagnose. When it comes to maintaining good heart health, the golden rules of health apply. Eat well, get an average of 30 minutes or more of exercise per day, aim for eight hours of sleep a night and avoid smoking to shape your future for the better.

Family History

You might be as fit as a fiddle, but if your parents or any siblings have a history of heart disease, a family physician will want you to get checked out. A heart specialist Singapore will likely ask about things like worsening shortness of breath, unexplained dizziness following exertion, or tightness in your chest. They may even perform a treadmill stress test or calcium scoring to assess calcium deposits on your coronary arteries.