Heart of the matter: City's young are prone to cardiac arrest

MUMBAI: Dr Ramakant Panda is a worried man these days. His heart patients are getting younger — the youngest is a 19-year-old girl. “I perform a bypass surgery on at least one person below 35 every month. Ten years back, I wouldn’t get such a case even once a year,” says Panda, Chief Cardiologist at the Asian Heart Institute. Welcome to the new Mumbai: young, fast, ambitious, and willing to burn the candle at both ends to get the best in life.

The city’s population - 14 million in all — is young, with 70 per cent below 35 years. Experts estimate that one in seven Mumbaikars below 35 is in the grip of one, or more, of the deadly quartet: diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure and heart disease. That makes a whopping 1.4 million patients.

“Many are not aware of their affliction as symptoms like obesity or high risk behaviour like smoking are absent. A majority are taken by surprise and become aware only when they get a shooting pain in their chest,” says Panda.

A WHO study reveals that 50 per cent of heart patients in India are under 45. “Indians are three times more prone to heart problems than their Caucasian counterparts and 20 times more than the Japanese,” says the report.

India’s dubious distinction as the diabetes capital of the world, and Mumbai’s significant contribution to that, does not help matters.

“Every fifth diabetes patient in the world is an Indian. And among Indians, every eighth diabetic is in Mumbai,” says endocrinologist Dr Shashank Joshi, who has conducted a diabetes survey in western India.

May 3, 2005 was like every other day for 30-year-old software professional Ajit Indorkar, except for a dull, thudding pain in his chest. “I attributed it to bad food the previous night and did not bother too much about it,” he says.

By the time he reached his Bandra office from Mulund, he was violently ill, vomiting thrice and once passing out in the bathroom. “I called my home and everyone said it must be food poisoning. But my dad asked me to go to a hospital and get an ECG,” he says.

What the doctors told him left him dumbfounded. “They said I was suffering an angina attack and could suffer a full blown heart attack any moment. I just could not believe it,” he says. Ajit was only 29 at that time and people that young, according to conventional wisdom, suffered from common colds and not heart attacks.

But Dr Praful Kerkar, head of Cardiology Department, KEM is not surprised. “Heart ailments are fast becoming a lifestyle disease,” he says. Kerkar should know. He was one of the two doctors who studied 75 young heart patients in Mumbai. “We found that these 50 per cent of the patients were smokers. It is a significant number by itself, but not so if you consider that 20 years ago 90 per cent of the heart patients were smokers.”

The study found more than a third of patients suffered from moderate to severe stress. “For today’s generation 12 hour work days and 72 hour weeks are normal. Couple that with no exercise, junk food and increasing acceptance of processed food – high in sodium and potassium – and you have deadly cocktail,” he says.

Treat your heart well

Today Indorkar religiously stays away from this deadly cocktail. “I was 68 kg when I suffered the heart attack. Today I am 52kgs, the ideal for my height,” he says. “A heart attack is not the end of life. You just have to be disciplined in what you eat and when you eat. Every packet of chips or every piece of cake counts.”

Indorkar, however, has had to make lifestyle changes, which includes daily exercise, consciously not letting stress spoil your day and popping six tablets every day. “These changes have made me healthier,” he says.

Dr Kerkar believes the ‘BPO culture’, with its long and irregular working hours and night shifts, do not allow the body to recuperate adequately, with the heart affected the most in the long run. 

Dr Panda is also alarmed at the pollution levels. “Standing at one of the busy cross-sections of Mumbai is equivalent to smoking ten cigarettes, one of the major contributory factors to heart ailments,” he says

It isn’t the end of life

In 1974 former Mumbai cricket captain Milind Rege had a heart attack. He was just 29. “I was playing a single-wicket competition with Karsan Ghavri when I felt a shooting pain in my left side. I didn’t think too much of it and went on to win!”

Later on, Sunil Gavaskar and others bundled him into a car and took him to KEM, where doctors told him that he was suffering a heart attack. 

Rege went on to captain Mumbai. Today he is Tata Steel’s head of corporate communications. “Today heart care is so good that even if you have an attack, it is not the end of life.”