Karol Watson, M.D.

Cardiologist at UCLA, co-director of the Preventive Cardiology Program

Dr. Karol Watson

The Preventive Cardiology Program is just aimed at keeping our population from suffering unnecessary heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases.

Interviewer: What are some of the ways that a population can do that?

Believe it or not, the most effective way to do that is by instituting very low-tech, non-pharmalogical things like appropriate diet, exercise, physical fitness and activity, maintaining ideal body weight, things that don't cost any money, but are incredibly hard to get people to do. And when that is done we can actually make a significant improvement on people's lives and health.

Interviewer: What percent of your patients are what we would consider elderly?

Well, approximately 80% of my patients are over the age of 65, but I no longer consider that necessarily elderly. And I think there's so many other things that go into what makes a patient quote, or unquote "old" rather than just their age. In many of my instances, I have 80 and 90 year old patients who seem quite young and quite vital to me. And I have some patients who are 50 who seem quite old and not at all vital. So, I think our definition of old and elderly is getting blurred along a lot of lines.

The way that I look at it a lot of time is physiologic age rather than a chronological age. So, if a 50-year-old patient has health conditions and health behaviors and mental attitude that make them old, then I think of them as old. If an 80-year-old patient has excellent physical conditioning, good health behaviors, good attitude, they very rarely seem old to me. They seem young and vital.

Next: Dr. Watson on living to 100