What are heart disease symptoms?

does it include hair loss?
does it include chest pains?

My brother-in-law experienced lots of gas pain symptoms several months before he died.

If you are concerned about heart disease, make a call to the cardiology center of your local hospital and tell them you want to schedule an ultrafast CT of your heart. This is a fast, non-invasive test that will tell you exactly how much calcification, if any, you have in your coronary arteries. You can then take this information to your doctor and come up with a treatment plan that fits your situation.

Statin drugs are very effective at stopping the progression of atherosclerosis but they have significant risks. These risks are an acceptable trade off for someone with significant heart disease but its probably not a good idea to take them if you have zero heart disease. Discuss it with your doctor.
Some symptoms of heart disease are cold extremities, lethargy, dizziness, senility, difficulty thinking, high blood pressure, pain in the legs on exertion, angina, blurred vision, enlarged heart, difficulty breathing, palpitations, heart attack and embolism.
heart disease...chest pain, shortness of breath, pain can radiate down arms..(usually left) into the jaw, nausea, vomiting, faintness, dizziness...sweating....weakne... in the arm or in general...no hair loss though
Hair Loss and Heart Disease

By Norra MacReady
WebMD Medical News

Jan. 23, 2000 (Los Angeles) -- Baldness may be more than just a cosmetic indignity: it could be a marker of heart disease risk, especially in men with other risk factors such as high blood pressure or high cholesterol.

Heart attacks, chest pain due to blocked arteries (called angina), and the need for balloon angioplasty or bypass surgery all are forms of heart disease, the researchers explained.

In men with high cholesterol and severe baldness at the vertex, or crown of the head, heart disease risk was increased nearly threefold compared to men who had high cholesterol but were not bald, senior author JoAnn E. Manson, MD, DrPH, tells WebMD.

High blood pressure was associated with an 80% increase in heart disease risk if the men were also bald. Mild and moderate vertex baldness were also associated with an increased risk of heart disease, but to a lesser extent. Frontal baldness -- a receding hairline -- had little relationship to heart disease. "To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale study showing a relationship between a specific pattern of baldness and heart-disease risk," Manson says. The researchers, in addition, saw that the men with more severe hair loss developed more heart disease during the 11 years they were watched than men with only mild to moderate hair loss, suggesting a link between the degree of hair loss and heart disease risk.

The biological link between hair loss and heart disease could involve elevated levels of male hormones, says Manson, an endocrinologist and chief of preventive medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. The scalp has a higher density of male-hormone receptors, and high levels of hormones such as testosterone are associated with an increased risk of hardening of the arteries and blood clotting. Although this study did not include women, Manson says that true male-pattern baldness in women, which is associated with an increase in male hormones, has been linked to an increased risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, and abnormal cholesterol, all of which raise the risk of heart disease. She cautions, however, that this finding has not been well studied.

Men certainly can't change their pattern of hair loss, Manson says, "and we don't yet know if the medications used to prevent hair loss in men will decrease [heart disease] risk." However, "male-pattern baldness may be a useful marker of men who could benefit from vigilant modification of risk factors we can change. This finding could be a message for increased attention to screening and preventive measures to lower the risk of heart disease in this population."
http://www.webmd.com/content/article/23/...