Your doctor is supposed to assess your cardiac risk for you, and coach you on what you should be doing to reduce that risk. But, despite pleas from medical experts and professional societies to do so, many doctors are still bad at performing accurate risk assessments, and are particularly terrible about spending the necessary time to instruct their patients on appropriate steps to reduce that risk.

This, one supposes, is to be expected when efficiency experts (those employed by insurance companies and the government, the parties whose money is at risk whenever patients see doctors)  have determined that 7.5 minutes is the appropriate average time for a "patient encounter." Doctors who do not want to be officially designated "low quality" need to pay attention to these and other expert-generated guidelines.

It is thus fortunate that, to a large extent, cardiac risk assessment is something you can do yourself.  Here's what you need to know about assessing your risk for heart disease.

Studies now show that smoking is the major cause of heart attacks in people under 40 years of age. Read what this means - for younger smokers, and for those not so young - here.

More and more people today are being told that they have "diastolic dysfunction" (or diastolic heart failure.) Diastolic dysfunction occurs when the ventricles of the heart become relatively "stiff," and thus it becomes relatively difficult to fill the ventricles with blood in between heart beats. Read what causes diastolic dysfunction, how it is diagnosed, what it means to have it, and how it is treated, here.

Atrial fibrillation is one of the most common cardiac arrhythmias - and unfortunately, it is of the most difficult to treat. Here is a review of atrial fibrillation, its causes and consequences, and the options for therapy.