Your lifestyle may invite new diseases

Terje Uusen, a 42-year-old Estonian woman, recently died in Ahmedabad where she had to be deplaned when she complained of severe chest pain and breathlessness on board a Goa-Delhi flight. After an emergency landing, she was rushed to Apollo Hospital where doctors declared her dead on arrival. Her skin was found to have bluish discoloration. She had died of pulmonary embolism.

Ramesh Shah was driving on the highway when he lost control over the steering wheel as he had fallen into a short, involuntary nap. His car was about to crash into the truck ahead when an alert companion noticed his condition and steered the car to safety. Shah often falls asleep involuntarily. And even after a whole night’s sleep, he feels tired in the morning. He suffers from sleep apnoea.

Pulmonary embolism and sleep apnoea are among a host of other health conditions that doctors have identified as the emerging new lifestyle diseases, though the ‘culprit lifestyle’ is not ‘unhealthy’ in every case.

For example, take the case of Terje Uusen. The bluish discolouration of skin detected on her is a symptom of pulmonary embolism, a dangerous condition that has been found to affect flyers who frequently take long flights (more than 12 hours long). It also occurs in professionals at call centres who have to keep odd hours.

“In people making long journeys by air, a blood clot sometimes forms in the legs because they have been seated for many hours. The clot travels up the blood stream and blocks the pulmonary artery,” said Dr Narendra Raval, president, Association of Chest Physician of Gujarat.

He said that when the clot gets stuck in pulmonary artery, the person develops severe chest pain, breathlessness, and sudden bluish discoloration of skin cause by reduced amount of oxygen in the blood.

“The ECG of a patient in this condition can appear normal because the clot can be detected only by pulmonary angiography,” Raval said. He added that now there is a special Doppler test available which can be used to scan the veins of the legs for clots. The clot, if not removed in time, can cause death.  As for Shah’s sleep apnoea, it is a disease linked to obesity. Its main symptom is the patient’s tendency to fall asleep involuntarily for a short period during the day and complain of tiredness even after sleeping the whole night.    

Dr Nilesh Shah, a lung specialist, said that sleep apnoea is caused if there is an obstruction in the windpipe. "The condition is commonly found in obese or short-necked people. Due to the obstruction near or around the windpipe, the gap between two breaths is stretched to more than 7 seconds and about 20 to 50 such gaps occur in an hour when the person is asleep," he said.

Shah further explained that at times the breathing is obstructed during sleep to such an extent that it can turn fatal as the obstruction blocks normal respiration. This condition can now be diagnosed correctly with the use of new investigative methods, and if the obstruction is severe, it can be surgically removed. Earlier, when people talked of lifestyle diseases, the health problems that most often came to mind were hypertension, diabetes, heart ailments and psychological illnesses.

These ailments are still a major threat but greater awareness and medical advances have But the new lifestyle diseases are only now beginning to be understood, though the general awareness about them is abysmally low. It is to raise the general awareness about these new ailments and to share knowledge about them that the Association of Chest Physicians of Gujarat has organised a two-day conference on June 18 and 19 in the city on the new lifestyle diseases. More than 500 doctors are expected to attend the conference.