Maybe you don’t exercise regularly or pay as much attention to your diet as you should, but you feel fine — no aches, no pains and no shortness of breath — and if you feel OK, you must be OK, right?

That’s exactly what makes heart disease so pervasive and so dangerous: often, the first symptom we have that anything is wrong is a life-threatening heart attack. Even the early symptoms of heart disease are often attributed to something different — chest pain is just indigestion, or the headache caused by your high blood pressure is owed to staying up too late or maybe a change in the weather.

Knowing what’s up with your heart is invaluable to ensuring your continued good health. Unchecked, issues like high cholesterol, hypertension, coronary artery disease (CAD), irregular heart rhythms and more will worsen until they result in a heart attack, stroke or sudden cardiac arrest.

Here are the screenings you need to receive regularly to ensure your heart — and your health — are in prime condition:

Blood Pressure
Blood pressure is both one of the easiest and hardest cardiac issues to detect. It’s difficult, because it often has no symptoms; but it’s easy because access to monitoring equipment is widespread. Most pharmacies offer a screening station with an automated cuff that can take a blood pressure reading. You can also purchase an automated blood pressure cuff to use at home for relatively little cost. Most fire stations also offer free blood pressure checks, as do the Tanner Urgent Care locations in Carrollton, Villa Rica, Bremen and Wedowee, Ala.

Keep a card or slip of paper in your wallet or purse and write down the date and reading of your blood pressure checks. Since high blood pressure increases your risk of a heart attack or stroke, you should keep an eye on it and see a doctor if it regularly registers above 130/80 mm Hg. You can control blood pressure with exercise, diet and medication.

Body Weight
Stepping on the scales doesn’t tell the whole story of how your weight can impact your heart. A more accurate reading is tallied from figuring your body mass index (BMI), which also takes into account your height to determine how close you are to a healthy weight. You can find your BMI by entering your height and weight in the BMI calculator in Tanner’s Health Library.

Being obese increases your risk for a host of conditions, including coronary artery disease, hypertension, stroke, irregular heartbeats, congestive heart failure and others. In addition, the lifestyle choices that lead to obesity — being sedentary and eating a high-fat, high-calorie diet — also increase your risk.

Cholesterol
In the simplest of terms, cholesterol is the fat in your blood. It can stick to the inside of your arteries, causing them to narrow or even become blocked, decreasing the flow of oxygen-rich blood. If this happens in your arms or legs, it can lead to peripheral artery disease; if this happens in the arteries carrying blood to your heart or brain, it can lead to a heart attack or stroke.

You should have a fasting lipoprotein profile conducted at least every four to six years if you have no personal history of high cholesterol — and more often if you do have a history of struggling to control your cholesterol. A fasting lipoprotein profile will measure the total amount of cholesterol in your blood, as well as your high-density lipoprotein (HDL, or “good” cholesterol), low-density lipoprotein (LDL, or “bad” cholesterol) and triglycerides.

Blood Glucose
This is one a lot of people overlook when they think about heart health, but almost 70 percent of people with diabetes who are 65 or older die from some form of heart disease, and 16 percent die from stroke.

Like heart disease, many people live with type 2 diabetes without even realizing it because symptoms — when they do present themselves — are often attributed to other causes. But diabetes is shown to affect your heart health in several ways. The insulin resistance that comes with diabetes can make it difficult to control your blood pressure, and people with diabetes often struggle to maintain balance between their HDL and LDL cholesterol levels, and tend to experience high triglyceride levels.

A blood glucose test measures the amount of sugar in your blood. High levels of sugar can indicate diabetes. You should have a blood glucose test done at least every three years — and more often if results indicate diabetes or prediabetes.

Electrocardiogram
Generally not recommended for routine screening, electrocardiograms can be useful in people with certain risk factors. An electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the simplest cardiac screenings. It involves placing a series of small stickers, called electrodes, on the skin. The information received may be helpful in certain individuals to diagnose heart disease.

Speak with your medical provider about his or her recommended frequency of screening with an ECG, since these are often dependent on several factors unique to each individual patient.

Calcium Scoring
When cholesterol sticks to the inside of your arteries, it creates plaque — which may become “calcified.”

Calcium scoring is a simple, low-cost, painless and non-invasive screening that allows physicians to check for the presence of calcified plaque inside the coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart, increasing your risk for a heart attack or stroke. Patients with higher levels of calcified plaque as measured by coronary calcium score are at increased risk of a future coronary event. If calcified plaque is detected, your physician can begin working with you on medical interventions and lifestyle changes to lower your risk for a heart attack or stroke.

While not covered by most insurance plans, Medicare or Medicaid, the screening has proven valuable in detecting early incidents of heart disease. Tanner Heart Care offers the screening for $99 in Carrollton, Villa Rica, Bremen and Wedowee. To determine if a coronary CT for calcium scoring scan is right for you, learn more at tanner-heartcare.org/healthyheart or call 678-509-6428.

You can learn more about the many heart screening capabilities and treatments available in west Georgia and east Alabama online at TannerHeartCare.org.