Heart: so even young people get sick

More and more in the flesh, less and less active on the physical front. It is a dangerous mix for the heart, what is being observed in the very young. With the tendency to gain weight and the increase in sedentary lifestyle, probably even more significant in periods of lockdown, the prevalence of heart disease in the under-40s also changes. To report this, data in hand, is an analysis conducted in Sweden by experts from the University of Gothenburg, which appeared in the Journal of Internal Medicine. Over the years, the study assessed conscripts, i.e. 18-year-olds, monitoring their state of health for twenty years. And he took a series of snapshots that, in the end, allow us to trace the changes in the prevalence of different pathologies in this age group. Result: even if we are on overall low numbers, it seems that there is an increase in cases of decompensation, as well as of cerebral stroke, in the face of an overall trend towards a decrease in the number of heart attacks. The analysis examined more than one million and 250 thousand young males: their data collected at the time of enrollment were then correlated with databases on general health and on the causes of death. The curiosity of the study is that it included people recruited between 1971 and 1995, with monitoring in subsequent years, thus offering a sort of “film” on the changes in the state of health at the age of majority and the pathologies observed. Precisely from these analyzes, the researchers, led by David Åberg of the Swedish university, were able to reconstruct that, in the face of an overall decline in the number of heart attacks, cases of heart failure, as well as stroke, have increased. In particular, between the first and last cohort considered (from 1971 to 1995, with groups considered every five years), in the twenty years following enrollment in the study there was a decline in heart attacks of 43 percent, reaching up to to 0.8 per thousand people under 40. even the cases of death from cardiovascular diseases in general have practically halved. The curve for heart failure instead moved in the opposite direction, with an increase of 69% in terms of cases between the first five years of observation (1971-75), compared to the last (1991-95). For stroke, the trend has also been upwards over time.

The extra pounds, in terms of trends, seem to make a difference in explaining the phenomenon. Sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy diet and lack of physical activity seem to bring about the combination that puts the heart at risk. The average weight gain observed in just 25 years appears to be extremely significant. The percentage of overweight subjects with a body mass index between 25 and 30 has in fact increased from 6.6 to 11.2% between 1971 and 1995. Even worse has gone for the frankly obese people: we have gone from one subject per hundred in the first cohort to 2.6% observed at the end of the last century. According to the authors of the study, these data help to explain the “fatigue” of the heart that is correlated to heart failure, albeit in a trend that sees a decrease in heart attacks and global mortality (we always speak of people under 40 years) for cardiovascular diseases. However, there would probably be other elements capable of influencing the situation: the research mentions in this sense the possible impact of stress and the role of drug abuse, but these are only hypotheses. One certainty remains, found by Swedish experts: if you don’t move and gain weight, your heart gets tired, so much so that if there were not this rising epidemic of overweight, probably in the younger age group the prevalence of heart disease could drop again. .