Maintaining Heart Health What Tests Can Tell You.

Byline: Paula A. Johnson, M.D., Celeste Robb-Nicholson, M.D., and Nancy A. Ferrari, Adapted from the Harvard Women's Health Watch and the Harvard Heart Letter. For more information, go to health.harvard.edu/NEWSWEEK.

You probably know your total cholesterol level, maybe even your LDL. But do you really know how healthy your heart is? Blood cholesterol is just one of several important indicators that physicians can now measure. Here are some tests you should consider.

The lipid profile (a measure of the level of various fats in the blood) is crucial for everyone. Keeping LDL cholesterol in check lowers heart-disease risk in both sexes, but maintaining a healthy triglyceride and HDL level is especially important for women. Likewise, diabetes is a bigger risk factor for women than for men, and it can set in without ever causing symptoms. So every woman should ask her doctor about whether to have her blood sugar tested. In addition to a routine glucose reading, some women benefit from a test called hemoglobin A1c, which estimates average blood-sugar levels over a period of a month.

Inflammation is another strong predictor of cardiovascular trouble. Many with high blood levels of an inflammatory marker called C-reactive protein (or CRP) face a greater risk for heart attack and stroke--and women with high CRP levels do not always have high cholesterol. Though CRP testing is not included in most ...