Heart Attack among Healthy Young Adults Explained

Hypertension and Cardiovascular diseases are usually considered as old age disease, but now a days some cases of severe hear diseases are reported among people in their 20s or 30s. Usually people find it hard to believe that heart problems can occur among these age groups even with good BMI. Sometime just good weight and workout routine is not enough, if their are some loopholes in your lifestyle. Reading this article will definitely improve your knowledge and will make you understand how your body works. 

Lets begin with some common issues that are often ignored but can lead to heart problems.

Loud snoring : Loud snoring is a major symptom of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Snoring happens when your throat relaxes and blocks your airway. As soon as your brain feels lack of breathing it signals your throat muscles to contract and make way for air. It can happen from tens to hundred of times in a single night, which disturbs your sleep and each such instance releases stress hormones. It increases your heart rate and blood pressure several times during a single night and increases the chances of developing heart diseases.

Lack of Sleep : Either its due to insomnia or any other reason, it triggers your body's stress response and puts excess workload on your heart. If lack of sleep is a regular pattern of your lifestyle then in long run it can easily make you a heart patient.
According to some researches now people are sleeping 6.8 hr per night which is 1.5 hr less than a century ago, which may be a major reason behind increased cardiovascular diseases.
Disturbed Sleep : Anti-inflammatory mechanism of our body is regulated by our sleep. Disturbed sleep or poor quality sleep disrupts this mechanism. Researchers have found that disturbed sleep lowers the amount of  hypocretin, a hormone that regulates sleep and wake states, and increases the amount of white blood cells in circulation. Loss of hypocretin makes white blood cells collect at the plaque build up inside your arteries, leading to inflammation and atherosclerosis.

Tight Clothes : Tight clothes (especially tight jeans which is popular among youngsters) can lead to disturbance in blood circulation, which may lead to excess workload on your heart. Recently some cases were reported where young healthy adults faced severe heart problems due to tight jeans. To know more you may read another article Your Jeans putting you at health risk.

Calcification : 99% of calcium in our body is in form of bones and teeth, and most of us get calcium through dietary intake to keep our bones healthy. 1% of calcium usually remains in our blood, but in some circumstances it starts to get deposited inside arteries just like cholesterol. The bitter fact is that this calcium blockage is usually so hard that it can't be dissolved or penetrated by stent. There are several cases where calcification occurred in healthy adults and caused conditions like heart attack without any previous history of heart problem. To understand calcification better you must read Calcium deposits in Arteries causing Heart Problems

Bacteria inside arteries : Yes ! human body is home for several good and bad bacteria. Here an important fact is that even a bacteria which is good in one part of body, might be bad in another part. Now researchers have found some bacterial lipids inside our arteries, which are found responsible for building deposition. Our body considers these deposition as foreign material, and our immune response creates inflammation, thus making the blockage worse. Read More about bacteria blocking your arteries.

Stress : You must have seen scenes in movies where a bad news caused heart attack, but did you ever think how it happens. One possible explanation is that our body works through electrical impulses that are carried by nerves, and some sudden stress disrupts that electrical impulse function and heart attack happens. But another explanation found by researchers is that some bacteria residing inside our arteries and some plaque deposition in different arteries are responsible for that. When we are in deep stress, certain chemical changes occur in our blood, which makes these bacteria release some lipids. This lipid ruptures the non-fatal plaque in different arteries and later if that plaque reaches heart and get stuck there then it causes heart attack.

Dehydration : Last but not the least is Water. Lack of water in your body decreases the blood volume, which makes it thicker and decreases the blood pressure. To compensate it, our body constricts the blood vessels and our pulse rate increases. If you are habitual of drinking less water, then your are putting yourself at risk of CHD (coronary heart disease).

Everybody that looks healthy from outside might not be so, if he/she is following a bad lifestyle. So upgrade your lifestyle with good diet, good workout, better sleep, better hydration, better clothes and lower stress level to keep your heart healthy. Your heart works non-stop for your whole life, so its your responsibility to understand its needs. Stay healthy !

Reference:

  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2845795/
  • https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/155/9/827/58224

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