Slim, nonsmoking, fit boomers – both famous and infamous – are dropping dead all over the place.  If you have heart disease in your family, those statins, blood pressure drugs, fiber-filled breakfasts and brisk walks can help to keep you off the casualty list but you can’t totally modify family history.  A close relative younger than 55 with coronary disease increases heart attack risk, period.  You don’t have to feel the classic symptoms – chest heaviness, nausea, a cold sweat – to have major blockages in the vessels leading to the heart.  You can have shortness of breath, anxiety, fatigue or no symptoms at all.  And women after menopause actually have higherblood pressure than men in every state in America, which leads to restricted blood flow, which leads to heart attack, stroke, kidney failure and dementia.  Make friends with a cardiologist and stay up to date with those pulse, cholesterol, triglyceride, and CRP numbers; the nuclear stress test; CT Scan with calcium scoring; and Screening Vascular Ultrasound – these are the top indicators and tests for women.  The combination of PLSC and HSCRP scores caused doctors to reclassify 39% of intermediate-risk patients, for better and worse, in a recent study.  Yes, women with a high resting pulse rate (above 76 bpm) had a much higher heart attack risk in another large recent study.  Be evaluated by the Reynolds Score as opposed to the Framingham (check it out at www.reynoldsriskscore.com).