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Patient Education • Men's Health

The Silent Killer:
What Every Man Over 40 Needs to Know About Heart Attack Risk

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in American men. Nearly half of sudden cardiac deaths have no prior symptoms. The chronic pain that brought you into our office may be the least dangerous problem you have.

Kyle Hemsley, DC — MVMT Rx Sports Care & Chiropractic  |  May 2026  |  18 min read

The Silent Killer — EKG heartbeat visualization representing heart attack risk in men. From flatline to strong pulse — it is not too late to change the trajectory. MVMT Rx Sports Care and Chiropractic, Reno and Sparks NV.

Why This Post Exists

For Russ

I need to tell you about someone before we get into the research. Because the research is important, but it is not the reason I am writing this. A man named Russ is the reason I am writing this.

Russ came to see me at 62 years old. He was in chronic pain. He was taking eight Vicodin a day and drinking on top of it. He was not a caricature of poor choices. He was a man who had been in pain for a long time and had been managing it the only way anyone had ever offered him. When we started working together, he was genuinely trying. He had started to decrease his medication. He had cut back on the alcohol. He had committed to the rehab process. He had just signed up to begin working with our functional medicine doctor. He was not a finished product — nobody is — but he was pointed in the right direction for the first time in a long time, and he knew it.

And then he died of a sudden heart attack, mid-way through his plan of care. Not in our office. Not where anyone could have done anything about it. He was just gone.

Russ left behind his daughter and his newborn first granddaughter. A granddaughter he had just started talking about meeting in the way that people talk about things they are allowing themselves to want again. I cried for days thinking about him. I still think about him. He deserved more time than he got.

I recorded this the week we lost Russ. 21,000 people watched it. 88 people commented. It needed to be said out loud.

I am not telling you about Russ to make you feel something for the sake of feeling it. I am telling you about him because he is the reason I take the whole picture seriously now — not just the musculoskeletal complaint that walks in the door. When someone comes in with chronic pain, daily medication use, excess weight, a sedentary lifestyle, and a long history of avoiding doctors, I no longer see a spine case or a knee case. I see a person carrying risk factors they may not even know about. And some of those risk factors are far more dangerous than the pain they came in for.

Russ taught me that lesson. He should not have had to. This post is my attempt to make sure his story counts for something — that the next man sitting in my office with the same profile gets the full conversation, not just the adjustment and the exercise prescription.

If any of this sounds familiar to you — if you are a man over 40 carrying chronic pain, taking daily medication, not exercising, not sleeping well, eating whatever is convenient, and telling yourself you feel fine — this post is for you. And I need you to read the whole thing.

The Numbers

Heart Disease in Men: The Leading Cause of Death You Are Not Thinking About

Heart disease kills approximately one in every four American men. It is the leading cause of death in the United States — not cancer, not accidents, not respiratory disease. Heart disease. And it has held that position for decades.1

In 2023, the American Heart Association reported that cardiovascular disease accounts for more deaths annually than all forms of cancer and chronic lower respiratory disease combined. The total annual death toll exceeds 900,000 Americans. Of those, a disproportionate share are men, with men developing coronary artery disease at younger ages and dying from it at higher rates than women through their 40s, 50s, and 60s.1

But the statistic that should concern you most is this one: nearly half of all sudden cardiac deaths occur in people who had no prior diagnosis of heart disease.1,2 That means roughly half of the men who die of a heart attack this year walked around yesterday believing they were healthy. They had no chest pain. No shortness of breath. No diagnosed condition. They felt fine. And then they were not.

The critical takeaway: Heart disease does not announce itself. Atherosclerosis — the buildup of plaque in the arteries — is a silent, decades-long process. By the time there are symptoms, the disease is already advanced. For many men, the first symptom of heart disease is the cardiac event itself.

This is not an abstract risk for a future version of you. If you are a man over 40 with multiple modifiable risk factors — excess body fat, physical inactivity, chronic inflammation, poor diet, chronic stress, daily medication use — this disease is already in progress. The question is not whether you are at risk. The question is what you are going to do about it.

The INTERHEART Study: 90% of Heart Attack Risk Is Modifiable

In 2004, Yusuf et al. published the INTERHEART study in The Lancet — one of the largest and most cited cardiovascular studies in history. The researchers examined over 29,000 participants across 52 countries and identified nine modifiable risk factors that account for over 90% of the population-attributable risk of a first myocardial infarction worldwide.3

Read that number again. Over 90%. That means heart attacks are not primarily genetic bad luck. They are not random. They are not inevitable. More than nine out of ten heart attacks are driven by factors that you can change.

The nine modifiable risk factors identified by INTERHEART:3

  • Abnormal lipids (dyslipidemia — elevated ApoB/ApoA1 ratio)
  • Smoking
  • Hypertension (high blood pressure)
  • Diabetes
  • Abdominal obesity (visceral fat — the fat around your organs, not just the number on the scale)
  • Psychosocial stress (depression, perceived life stress, locus of control)
  • Low daily consumption of fruits and vegetables
  • Excessive alcohol consumption
  • Physical inactivity

Every single one of those is modifiable. Not one of them requires a genetic miracle or a pharmaceutical breakthrough. They require decisions, support, and sustained effort — but they are within your control. That is the most important piece of information in this entire post.

Risk Factors That MVMT Rx Actually Touches

We are a sports chiropractic and rehabilitation clinic — not a cardiology office. But when you look at the INTERHEART risk factors and then look at the typical profile of a chronic pain patient walking through our doors, the overlap is staggering. Here are the modifiable cardiovascular risk factors that our model directly addresses:

  • Obesity and poor body composition — excess visceral fat produces chronic low-grade inflammation through pro-inflammatory cytokines (TNF-alpha, IL-6) released by adipose tissue. This is not cosmetic. It is metabolic and immunological. Visceral fat is an active endocrine organ driving systemic inflammation that damages arterial walls.3,4
  • Physical inactivity and deconditioning — sedentary behavior is an independent cardiovascular risk factor, separate from obesity. You can be thin and sedentary and still carry significant risk. The dose-response relationship between physical activity and cardiovascular mortality reduction is one of the most consistent findings in all of exercise science.4,5
  • Chronic systemic inflammation — from poor diet, gut dysbiosis, chronic pain states, inadequate sleep, and excess adipose tissue. Inflammation is a central mechanism in atherosclerotic plaque formation and rupture.6
  • Poor diet — high processed food intake, excess refined carbohydrates and industrial seed oils, insufficient fiber, inadequate micronutrient density. The standard American diet is a cardiovascular risk factor in itself.3
  • Chronic stress and elevated cortisol — sustained psychological stress raises blood pressure, promotes visceral fat storage, disrupts sleep, increases inflammation, and drives poor dietary and behavioral choices. Stress is not just a mental health issue. It is a cardiovascular risk factor with direct physiological mechanisms.3,7
  • Excessive alcohol use — increases blood pressure, promotes arrhythmias, contributes to weight gain, damages the liver, and disrupts sleep architecture. The relationship between alcohol and cardiovascular risk is dose-dependent, and "moderate" consumption carries more risk than previously believed.3
  • Daily NSAID use — chronic NSAID use carries well-documented cardiovascular risk, including increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and heart failure. This risk exists even at over-the-counter doses and increases with duration of use. If you are taking ibuprofen or naproxen daily for chronic pain, you are adding cardiovascular risk on top of whatever risk factors you already carry.8,9
  • Unmanaged metabolic markers — blood pressure, cholesterol, fasting glucose, hemoglobin A1c, and inflammatory markers like hs-CRP. Many men have no idea where their numbers are because they have not had bloodwork in years.1,3
  • Low testosterone and hormonal imbalance — low testosterone in men is associated with increased visceral fat, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and elevated cardiovascular mortality. It is both a symptom of poor metabolic health and a contributor to worsening it.10

If you are reading this list and checking off three, four, five of these risk factors — that is not unusual. In fact, it is the norm for the chronic pain population. These risk factors cluster together. They feed each other. And collectively, they represent a cardiovascular risk profile that is far more dangerous than the sore back or bad knee that prompted the initial visit.

The Dangerous Assumption

The "I Feel Fine" Problem: Why Men Don't Act Until It's Too Late

There is a sentence I hear in nearly every male patient intake over 40. Some version of it. It comes after the questionnaire, after the health history, after we start asking about the bigger picture beyond the pain complaint:

"I mean, other than this [back/knee/shoulder], I feel fine."

Here is the problem with that sentence: atherosclerosis does not produce symptoms. Plaque builds in your coronary arteries over decades — silently, progressively, without pain, without shortness of breath, without any signal your body can detect. You feel fine because the disease has not yet reached the point of critical stenosis or plaque rupture. But the disease is there. It has been building since your 20s and 30s.1,2

The research is clear on this point: the majority of acute coronary events occur at sites where the plaque burden was not causing significant stenosis. In other words, the plaques that kill you are often not the ones that would have been detected by standard screening. They are smaller, unstable plaques that rupture suddenly, forming a clot that blocks blood flow to the heart muscle.2

This means "I feel fine" is not evidence of cardiovascular health. It is the absence of late-stage symptoms in a disease that operates without symptoms for most of its timeline.

Men are conditioned to push through discomfort and avoid doctors. This is not a personality trait to celebrate. It is a risk factor. The cultural expectation that men should be tough, self-reliant, and dismissive of health concerns is directly correlated with later presentation, worse outcomes, and higher mortality from preventable disease. The men who "never go to the doctor" are not proving their toughness. They are gambling with incomplete information.

Consider the typical timeline: A man in his 30s begins accumulating risk factors — less activity, more weight, worse diet, more stress, less sleep. Through his 40s and 50s, those risk factors compound. Plaque accumulates. Blood pressure drifts upward. Cholesterol shifts. Insulin sensitivity declines. Visceral fat increases. None of this produces symptoms he would notice. He "feels fine."

Then at 55, or 60, or 62, an unstable plaque ruptures, a clot forms, and a coronary artery occludes. He has a heart attack. If he survives it, everyone says it came out of nowhere. But it did not come out of nowhere. It came from decades of unaddressed, unmonitored, modifiable risk factors that nobody ever talked to him about.

That is what happened to Russ. And it is what is quietly happening to thousands of men right now who feel fine.

The Overlap Nobody Talks About

The Connection Between Chronic Pain and Cardiovascular Risk

This is the section that matters most if you found this post because you are dealing with chronic pain. Because the connection between chronic musculoskeletal pain and cardiovascular disease is not coincidental. It is mechanistic. The two conditions share risk factors, feed each other, and create a compounding cycle that accelerates both.

Here is the typical profile of a chronic pain patient who walks into our office:

  • Sedentary — because movement hurts, so they stop moving. Physical inactivity is an independent cardiovascular risk factor.3,5
  • Overweight or obese — because inactivity plus unchanged caloric intake plus stress eating equals weight gain. Excess visceral fat drives systemic inflammation and metabolic dysfunction.3,4
  • Chronically inflamed — from pain itself, from visceral fat, from poor diet, from gut dysbiosis, from inadequate sleep. Chronic inflammation is a direct driver of atherosclerotic plaque formation.6
  • On daily NSAIDs or acetaminophen — because nobody addressed the root cause of their pain, so they manage it with medication. Daily NSAID use carries independent cardiovascular risk.8,9
  • Sleeping poorly — because chronic pain disrupts sleep architecture, and poor sleep drives inflammation, insulin resistance, elevated cortisol, weight gain, and impaired cardiovascular function.7
  • Chronically stressed — because living in pain is stressful. Because not being able to do the activities you used to do is stressful. Because worrying about your health without doing anything about it is stressful. Chronic stress elevates blood pressure, promotes visceral fat storage, and damages vascular endothelium.3,7
  • Eating poorly — because when you are in pain and stressed and sedentary, food choices degrade. Convenience wins. Processed food wins. Inflammatory dietary patterns set in.3
  • Avoiding medical care — because the last three providers did not help, or because the experience was demoralizing, or because they are men and men avoid doctors. This means metabolic markers go unmonitored for years.1

Every single item on that list is an independent cardiovascular risk factor. And they do not just add together — they multiply. A sedentary man with chronic pain who is overweight, inflamed, on daily NSAIDs, sleeping poorly, eating the standard American diet, and chronically stressed is not carrying seven independent risks. He is carrying a compounding, synergistic risk profile where each factor makes the others worse.

The pain complaint that brings a patient through the door is often the tip of the iceberg. It is the problem they feel. But underneath it sits a constellation of metabolic, inflammatory, behavioral, and lifestyle risk factors that represent a far greater threat to their longevity than the back pain or knee arthritis they came in for. If all we do is treat the musculoskeletal complaint and send them home, we have addressed the least dangerous thing on the list.

This is what Russ taught me. His pain was real, and it deserved treatment. But the eight Vicodin a day, the alcohol, the years of inactivity, the poor diet, the unmonitored metabolic health — those were the things that killed him. The pain was just the part he could feel.

The Path Forward

What Actually Reduces Cardiovascular Risk — and What MVMT Rx Does About It

The message of this post is not "you are going to die." The message is: this is preventable. The INTERHEART data tells us that over 90% of heart attack risk is driven by modifiable factors. That is not a death sentence. That is an opportunity. But an opportunity you have to act on.

Here is what the evidence says actually works — and how we structure our care to address it.

Progressive Exercise and Strength Training

This is the single most powerful cardiovascular risk reduction tool available to you. Period. The evidence is not subtle. Regular physical activity reduces all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, blood pressure, resting heart rate, dyslipidemia, insulin resistance, visceral fat, systemic inflammation, and psychosocial stress. No pharmaceutical intervention matches the breadth of benefit that consistent progressive exercise delivers.4,5

Strength training specifically — not just cardio — has emerged as a critical component. Resistance exercise improves insulin sensitivity, increases lean mass (which is metabolically protective), reduces visceral fat, improves vascular compliance, and reduces all-cause mortality independently of aerobic fitness. You do not have to choose between strength and cardio. You need both. And both need to be progressive — meaning they increase in difficulty over time in a structured, supervised manner.5

At MVMT Rx, progressive loading is the backbone of every plan of care. We are not giving you a sheet of stretches. We are building you a structured, goal-driven, objectively measurable exercise program that increases in intensity over time. That is not just pain care. That is cardiovascular risk reduction.

Body Composition Changes Through Nutrition Coaching and Progressive Loading

Losing weight matters, but losing fat while preserving or building muscle matters more. Crash diets that reduce scale weight through muscle loss and water depletion do not improve cardiovascular outcomes. What improves outcomes is reducing visceral fat, increasing lean tissue, and shifting your metabolic profile toward insulin sensitivity and reduced systemic inflammation.4

That requires two things simultaneously: a progressive training stimulus that signals your body to maintain and build muscle, and a nutritional approach that creates a sustainable energy deficit while providing adequate protein, micronutrients, and anti-inflammatory food patterns. We address both. Nutrition coaching is embedded in our model — not as an afterthought, but as a core pillar of care.

Anti-Inflammatory Diet and Targeted Supplementation

Chronic systemic inflammation is a central mechanism in atherosclerosis. Dietary strategies that reduce inflammation — increased omega-3 fatty acid intake, adequate fiber from vegetables and whole foods, reduced processed food and refined carbohydrate consumption, adequate vitamin D, and magnesium — have demonstrated meaningful effects on inflammatory markers and cardiovascular risk profiles.6

We are not selling you supplements. We are identifying whether your nutritional foundation has gaps that are contributing to your inflammatory load and metabolic dysfunction, and we are addressing them through whole-food-first strategies supplemented where the evidence supports it.

Stress Reduction Through Movement, Confidence, and Lifestyle Coaching

Psychosocial stress was one of the nine INTERHEART risk factors for a reason. Chronic stress damages your cardiovascular system through multiple direct pathways: sustained cortisol elevation, sympathetic nervous system overdrive, elevated blood pressure, endothelial dysfunction, and adverse behavioral changes (poor sleep, poor diet, alcohol use, physical inactivity).3,7

One of the most effective stress reduction strategies is competence. When a person who has been in chronic pain and physically declining for years begins to get stronger, begins to move without fear, begins to see objective progress in their physical capacity — the psychological effect is profound. Confidence reduces perceived stress. Autonomy reduces helplessness. Progress reduces despair. We see this in our patients every week. The physical changes drive psychological changes that drive behavioral changes. The cycle can spin in the other direction.

Reducing or Eliminating Daily NSAID Dependence

If you are taking ibuprofen, naproxen, or another NSAID every day for chronic pain, you are carrying cardiovascular risk that you may not know about. The Coxib and traditional NSAID Trialists' Collaboration meta-analysis demonstrated that chronic NSAID use increases the risk of major vascular events, including heart attack and stroke, with risk increasing with dose and duration.8,9

We wrote an entire post about the risks of daily pain medication. If you have not read it, you should.

The Hidden Cost of Daily Tylenol and NSAIDs →

What nobody told you about your pain medication — liver damage, GI bleeding, cardiovascular risk, delayed healing. Read the full breakdown.

The solution is not to white-knuckle through pain without medication. The solution is to identify and address the actual driver of the pain so that daily medication becomes unnecessary. When the root cause is treated — through progressive loading, manual therapy, and lifestyle modification — the need for daily NSAIDs typically resolves on its own.

Coordination with Functional Medicine

There are dimensions of cardiovascular risk that are outside a chiropractor's scope — bloodwork, metabolic panel interpretation, advanced lipid testing, inflammatory marker analysis, and medical management of identified conditions. This is why we work directly with functional medicine practitioners who can run the labs, interpret the results, and build a medically supervised plan alongside our rehabilitation work.

If you need comprehensive metabolic and functional medicine evaluation, we refer to and coordinate care with Dr. Lacey, a functional medicine provider who shares our philosophy of identifying and treating root causes rather than managing symptoms.

Men's Health Optimization and Hormonal Health

Low testosterone in men is associated with increased cardiovascular mortality, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, increased visceral fat deposition, and reduced lean mass. It is both a consequence of poor metabolic health and a contributor to further decline. Addressing hormonal health in men — through lifestyle optimization first, and through medical intervention when indicated — is a legitimate component of cardiovascular risk reduction.10

For patients who need evaluation and management of hormonal health, we work alongside Evan Fox, NP, who specializes in men's health optimization including testosterone evaluation and management in the Reno-Sparks area.

Getting Off the Couch and Into a Supervised, Goal-Driven Program

At the end of the day, the most important intervention is the simplest one to understand and the hardest one to execute: stop being sedentary and start loading your body progressively under the guidance of someone who knows what they are doing.

This is not a commercial pitch. It is the evidence. Physical inactivity is one of the strongest independent predictors of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality.4,5 Getting a chronic pain patient off the couch, moving safely, loading progressively, and building toward meaningful physical goals is the single most impactful thing we can do for their long-term health — far beyond resolving the pain complaint that brought them in.

Proof It Works

It Is Not Too Late

We wrote about one of our patients in a recent post — a man who came in at 315 pounds with chronic pain, a family history of fatal heart disease, and every modifiable risk factor stacked against him. He is now 242 pounds, stronger and more cardiovascularly fit than he has been in decades, and on track to hunt with his son and future grandkids into his 80s. His name is Mike, and his story is the proof that this trajectory can be reversed.

Read Mike's Full Story →

From 315 pounds and chronic pain to 242 pounds and stronger than he has been in decades. The full story is in our post on daily painkiller risks.

Russ did not get that ending. That is the part I carry. But Mike is getting it, because someone addressed the whole picture — not just the pain, but the weight, the diet, the inactivity, the inflammation, the metabolic risk, the functional capacity. That is the model. That is why we built it this way.

If you see yourself in this post — if you are carrying three, four, five of the risk factors described above — the window is still open. But it will not stay open forever. Heart disease does not wait for you to be ready. You have to decide to act.

Related Reading

Go Deeper

The Hidden Cost of Daily Tylenol and NSAIDs →

Liver damage, GI bleeding, cardiovascular risk, delayed healing — what the research says about chronic OTC painkiller use and why your pain deserves a better answer.

Low Back Pain: A Comprehensive Guide to Evidence-Based Care →

The most common chronic pain complaint in adults. What causes it, what the research supports, and why progressive loading outperforms passive treatment.

Knee Osteoarthritis: Why Strength Training Is the Best Medicine →

The evidence on progressive loading for knee OA — why the strongest predictor of outcomes is quadriceps strength, not imaging findings.

The Multi-Modal Approach to Chronic Pain →

Our comprehensive guide to how chiropractic adjustments, performance rehab, myofascial release, and advanced therapies work together to resolve chronic pain.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Common Questions About Heart Disease, Chronic Pain, and Risk Reduction

Can exercise really reduce heart attack risk?

Yes, and the evidence is overwhelming. Regular physical activity — including both aerobic exercise and resistance training — reduces cardiovascular mortality, lowers blood pressure, improves lipid profiles, reduces visceral fat, decreases systemic inflammation, and improves insulin sensitivity. The dose-response relationship is consistent across dozens of large-scale studies: more activity means less risk, with the greatest benefit seen in moving from sedentary to moderately active. No medication matches the breadth of cardiovascular benefit that consistent progressive exercise delivers. The key is that it must be progressive, consistent, and sustained — not a burst of activity followed by months of inactivity.

I feel fine — do I really need to worry about heart disease?

Unfortunately, yes. Atherosclerosis — the buildup of plaque in coronary arteries — is a silent process that develops over decades without producing symptoms. Nearly half of sudden cardiac deaths occur in individuals with no prior diagnosis of heart disease. Feeling fine is not evidence of cardiovascular health; it is the absence of late-stage symptoms in a disease that operates silently for most of its timeline. If you are a man over 40 with multiple modifiable risk factors — excess weight, physical inactivity, poor diet, chronic stress, daily medication use — the responsible course of action is to get screened and to begin addressing those risk factors now, not after a cardiac event.

How does chronic pain increase cardiovascular risk?

Chronic pain drives cardiovascular risk through multiple interconnected pathways. Pain leads to inactivity, which leads to weight gain and deconditioning. Chronic pain states increase systemic inflammation. Pain disrupts sleep, which impairs metabolic function and raises cortisol. Many chronic pain patients rely on daily NSAIDs, which carry independent cardiovascular risk. The stress of living in chronic pain elevates blood pressure and promotes visceral fat deposition. These risk factors do not just coexist — they compound each other, creating a synergistic risk profile that is greater than the sum of its parts.

What should I ask my doctor about heart disease screening?

Start with a comprehensive metabolic panel: fasting glucose, hemoglobin A1c, lipid panel (including advanced markers like ApoB if available), blood pressure measurement, and inflammatory markers such as hs-CRP. Ask about your family history risk profile. Ask whether a coronary artery calcium (CAC) score is appropriate for your age and risk factor profile. If you have not had bloodwork in more than two years, that is too long. Know your numbers. You cannot manage what you do not measure.

Can losing weight actually reverse heart disease risk?

Yes. Weight loss — specifically loss of visceral fat with preservation of lean mass — has been shown to improve nearly every modifiable cardiovascular risk factor: blood pressure, lipid profiles, insulin sensitivity, inflammatory markers, and vascular function. The critical distinction is how you lose the weight. Crash diets that sacrifice muscle mass do not produce lasting cardiovascular benefit. Sustainable fat loss through progressive resistance training combined with nutrition coaching preserves metabolically protective lean tissue while reducing the visceral fat that drives systemic inflammation and metabolic dysfunction.

What does MVMT Rx have to do with heart health?

We are not a cardiology practice — but the overlap between what we treat and what drives cardiovascular risk is enormous. Our patients come in for chronic pain, but they often carry the full profile of modifiable cardiovascular risk factors: excess weight, physical inactivity, chronic inflammation, poor diet, daily NSAID use, chronic stress, and unmonitored metabolic health. Our model addresses the whole picture — progressive loading, nutrition coaching, lifestyle modification, body composition improvement — and we coordinate with functional medicine and men's health providers for the components outside our scope. The musculoskeletal complaint is the reason they walk in the door. The cardiovascular risk reduction is what might save their life.

Medical Disclaimer: This post is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. The information presented reflects published peer-reviewed research and is intended to help readers make informed decisions in consultation with their healthcare providers. Heart disease screening, diagnosis, and medical management are outside the scope of chiropractic practice. Always consult your physician for cardiovascular screening, medication decisions, and medical management of identified conditions. MVMT Rx does not diagnose, treat, or manage cardiovascular disease. Our role is to address modifiable lifestyle and musculoskeletal factors that contribute to overall health risk through progressive rehabilitation, nutrition coaching, and coordination with qualified medical providers.

References

  1. Tsao CW, Aday AW, Almarzooq ZI, et al. Heart disease and stroke statistics — 2023 update: a report from the American Heart Association. Circulation. 2023;147(8):e93–e621. doi:10.1161/CIR.0000000000001123
  2. Benjamin EJ, Muntner P, Alonso A, et al. Heart disease and stroke statistics — 2019 update: a report from the American Heart Association. Circulation. 2019;139(10):e56–e528. doi:10.1161/CIR.0000000000000659
  3. Yusuf S, Hawken S, Ôunpuu S, et al. Effect of potentially modifiable risk factors associated with myocardial infarction in 52 countries (the INTERHEART study): case-control study. The Lancet. 2004;364(9438):937–952. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(04)17018-9
  4. Lavie CJ, Arena R, Swift DL, et al. Exercise and the cardiovascular system: clinical science and cardiovascular outcomes. Circulation Research. 2015;117(2):207–219. doi:10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.117.305205
  5. Liu Y, Lee DC, Li Y, et al. Associations of resistance exercise with cardiovascular disease morbidity and mortality. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. 2019;51(3):499–508. doi:10.1249/MSS.0000000000001822
  6. Libby P. Inflammation in atherosclerosis — no longer a theory. Clinical Chemistry. 2021;67(1):131–142. doi:10.1093/clinchem/hvaa275
  7. Steptoe A, Kivimäki M. Stress and cardiovascular disease: an update on current knowledge. Annual Review of Public Health. 2013;34:337–354. doi:10.1146/annurev-publhealth-031912-114452
  8. Bhala N, Emberson J, Merhi A, et al. Vascular and upper gastrointestinal effects of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs: meta-analyses of individual participant data from randomised trials. The Lancet. 2013;382(9894):769–779. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(13)60900-9
  9. McGettigan P, Henry D. Cardiovascular risk with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs: systematic review of population-based controlled observational studies. PLoS Medicine. 2011;8(9):e1001098. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001098
  10. Araujo AB, Dixon JM, Suarez EA, et al. Endogenous testosterone and mortality in men: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. 2011;96(10):3007–3019. doi:10.1210/jc.2011-1137

The Window Is Still Open — But It Will Not Stay Open Forever

If you see yourself in this post, a Discovery Visit is a free conversation — no obligation, no sales pitch. Just an honest assessment of where you stand and whether we can help you change the trajectory. Russ did not get this chance. You still do.

Book Your Free Discovery Call

MVMT Rx Sports Care & Chiropractic  |  Reno & Sparks, NV  |  (775) 245-4142

MVMT Rx Sports Care & Chiropractic  |  1761 Victorian Ave, Sparks, NV 89431  |  (775) 245-4142

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