Yahoo! Life: Heart Attacks in Young People Are Rare—But Rates Are Rising
Yahoo! Life recently interviewed C. Noel Bairey Merz, MD, director of the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai, about the increase in heart attacks among young adults, especially women.
Although heart attacks in people 18 to 44 are rare, they have increased more than 66% since 2019. However, heart attacks have decreased in all other adult age groups.
Bairey Merz told Yahoo! Life the uptick in heart attacks among younger adults could be traced in part to unhealthy lifestyle trends, such as a poor diet and physical inactivity.
“Nutrition habits are pretty well-formed in childhood,” Bairey Merz said. “I still eat pretty much the way I was raised. This was before fast food, before all the highly processed and snacking foods.”
Bairey Merz, director of the Linda Joy Pollin Women’s Heart Health Program in the Department of Cardiology, told Yahoo! Life she is studying why heart attack rates are spiking among women 35 to 54.
“The ‘diabesity’ epidemic is clearly contributing to a rising rate of heart disease,” she said, referring to increases in both diabetes and obesity. “And diabetes is a stronger risk factor [for cardiovascular problems] for women than for men, but we don’t know why.”
Bairey Merz told Yahoo! Life smoking and vaping also contribute to heart attack risk.
“We clearly are seeing a demographic of college-educated women who are more likely to start smoking when they go away to college … for what they say is weight management,” she said. “Don’t smoke; e-cigarettes are the same, vaping is the same, smoking cannabis is the same. There is no safe tobacco or cannabis [smoke].”
Bairey Merz told Yahoo! Life the connection between stress, low estrogen levels and heart disease also is being investigated.
Click here to read the complete article from Yahoo! Life.