Why incidence of heart attack is rising in youth

Aligarh: Heart diseases in India are taking a pandemic form, with disturbing fact of people below 45 years, or even below forty years of age, farming a major chunk of patients suffering from these ailments.

“Hypertension, diabetes, smoking, sedentary lifestyle, high lipid profile are some of the most obvious causes of spurt in cases of heart attacks in young Indian adults,” senior cardiologist and chairperson of Cardiology Department of JN Medical College, Aligarh, Dr Asif Hasan said talking to India News Stream.

However, he notes, sometimes young people without any history of diabetes or hypertension or smoking are falling prey to heart attacks, and currently in India there is no sufficient data to establish the causes of this phenomena.

But still new data is emerging that suggests increasing air pollution and drug addiction were becoming new killers of young hearts.

Today young people, especially in the metros and other big cities, have to commute long distances to reach their workplace, thus exposing themselves to PM 2.5 which is very high at points of traffic congestion in cities. This PM 2.5 causes clot formation and clogging of arteries leading to heart attack, says Dr Hasan.

He also notes that drug addiction too is becoming a major culprit, as substances like LSD, cocaine also lead to clot formation, and consumption of cocaine shrinks arteries.
He finds today’s eating habits and lifestyle also playing their part. Eating market foods cooked in oil recycled multiple times, and eating at odd hours, thanks to home delivery services, was also responsible in a major way for poor heart health.

In addition to overeating, malnutrition in India was also a factor in high incidence of heart diseases. It is no longer the disease of the rich, as today’s poor man is as much vulnerable to heart attacks as the rich because of Low body-mass index, for which malnutrition is one of the major reasons, he said.

Stress of modern life like job insecurity, pressure to perform in schools, exam worries have also put the youth under great stress that ultimately leads to hypertension, he says.
” In India most of the people do not know that they are suffering from hypertension. Only 25 percent of the population is aware of it and only half of this number is being treated properly, and that magnifies the scale of the problem. It is a cobra sitting in their pocket, and its victims and their families know about it only when it bites.”

Heart failure in youth is also causing many social problems in India as most of the times people in the age group of 40-45 are in the prime phase of earning livelihood and are the sole bread earner for their family.

When asked whether heart failure in the young population was related to Covid or Covid vaccine as was widely assumed after recent spurt in such cases, Dr Hasan said that so far there was no such data to conclude that it was the vaccine that had created this problem. ” Rather, I would say that it is the vaccine that has saved many lives. Without the vaccine, there would have been much more devastation,” he said .

He underlined that the Covid virus itself was the monster killer, as it could affect vital organs like lungs, brain and also heart as it causes inflammation in arteries.

So, it would be wrong to conclude that it is the vaccine that has caused problems in various parts of the body or heart attacks in the young, as there is no credible research or evidence to reach that conclusion, he noted.

” As I have already said that we need to have more data and coordination in data collection and analyses on the recent upsurge in heart attack in the young. In Western countries, we don’t have enough patients to collect sufficient data, but in India there is a huge number of patients, but unfortunately not enough facilities, arrangement and coordination in collecting data,” he said.

India News Stream