Heart Disease
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Ethnicity
2.100 Heart disease is number one killer of mankind across the globe. India could account for 60% heart disease cases worldwide (2008). It has been noticed that race and ethnicity do play a role in heart disease prevalence and some groups of people are at increased risk of heart disease. People of South Asian especially of Indian ethnicity have the highest rates of heart disease in the world despite coming from a culture that shuns smoking, encourages vegetarian diet and lacks many of the classic risk factors for the disease. Indians tend to develop heart disease at an average of 10 to 15 years earlier than the population in the West.
2.101 Racial disparity of heart disease prevalence has been noticed in Indians living elsewhere also. The rate of heart disease is 40 percent higher in Indians than that among the rest of Britain’s population. In Trinidad, Indians have double the national average for heart disease and in Singapore the risk for Indians is nearly four times than that of natives. In fact, scientific observation had been that certain races are more disposed to obesity, diabetes and heart disease than others.
2.102 Reasons for this Indian incongruence are uncertain, but scientists do believe that genetically our genes had probably over the years become programmed to be energy miser and thrifty so as to enhance metabolic efficiency and fat storage. Known as “thrifty gene hypothesis” this assumption attempts to explain our evolutionary development as a possible reason. Indians for a long time during the pre-historic times were subjected to extended periods of famine and starvations. These modified thrifty genes helped the body overcome the fasting times by using stored food deposited during feasting times, same as camel uses energy in his hump to cross the desert. But with modern times when food is always and easily available, thrifty genes are still operational and poor Indians are still storing fats around their waist for probable, prospective never-to-occur famine.
2.103 Another school of thought blames low foetal birth weight in India as possible mechanism for unusually high incidence of heart disease. The followers of this supposition believe that seeds of unhealthiness are sowed in the mother’s womb itself leading to development of heart disease in adulthood
2.104 “Early diagnosis is important, more so in South Asians who tend to have diffused heart disease. Instead of one major blockage in a main artery, they have several small plaque deposits in several arteries that do not obstruct blood flow in the normal course, but can do so suddenly if they rupture,” says Dr. R.R.Kasliwal, director of preventive cardiology at the Escorts Heart Institute and Research Centre.
2.105 Smaller plaques tend to be unstable and can rupture even when they have blocked just 15 percent to 20 percent of the artery. When a clot forms over the rupture as part of the body’s natural healing process, it may suddenly stop blood flow and cause a heart attack.
