Discover  these amazing facts about your ticker:

Excess weight hurts your heart at any age.
Your weight matters at any age. Being overweight or obese as a child makes it more likely for that the person to be overweight or obese as an adult too. The excess body weight in childhood can place them at risk of developing conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol and heart disease.

Carrying excess weight, especially around the belly, strains the heart and increases the risk of heart disease.

Your heart displays scars.
Once the heart is damaged and scarred from a heart attack, it can't repair itself, like other organs and tissues in your body, for example, a cut on your skin. As a result, when the heart is damaged, tough scar tissue forms in place of dead cells, so regions of the heart simply cease to function. That’s why  immediate emergency help is critical during a heart attack, because each minute that passes can leave more of your heart tissue permanently scarred.

Your heart can have downheartedness.
A variety of emotional or stressful situations such as the loss of a loved one, divorce or breakups, a serious accident, fear or extreme anger, can literally break your heart, with a condition called broken heart syndrome--also called stress-induced cardiomyopathy, or takotsubo cardiomyopathy.

Your heart is an organ of emotion too.
Though your heart and brain are two different entities, they are closely connected. When your emotions adversely affect your brain, your heart is affected as well. Your emotions can not only increase your risk of heart disease, but it can affect your recovery and increase your risk of future cardiac events also.

Heart attack symptoms may not be what you think.
Though, chest pain is very common with a heart attack, there are other subtler signs that indicate that you’re having or are about to have a heart attack like, discomfort in the arms, back, neck, heartburn, nausea, unusual tiredness, shortness of breath.

Your heart dreads pollution.
Breathing in fumes from traffic exhaust has long been known to raise the risk of heart disease. It’s not just air pollution, habitual exposure to loud noises — such as being held up in bumper to bumper traffic jams, living near noisy roads, airports or railway stations — can raise blood pressure and the risk of cardiac events according to studies.

Low sex drive can be a bad sign for your heart.
Erectile dysfunction can be considered as one of the first warning signs of heart disease in men. That’s because the tiny blood vessels in the penis is affected by fatty plaque build up before larger veins and arteries.
Research like this typically focuses on men because more men have heart disease. But the same reasoning can be applied to women, too.