Heart Disease UK

Avijit Lahiri, Eric Lim & Vijay D. Anand
The numbers are ominous: From 191 million diabetics worldwide in 1990, the number of diabetics will shoot up to 376 by 2025, say the World Health Organization projections. The incident will be most sharply felt in the developing world with an estimated with 90 million in India and 120 million in China falling pray to it.
Diabetes is a disease with associated with abnormal glucose metabolism. The reason it has attracted such attention is that diabetes is closely associated with the development of cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack, stock hypertension, kidney failure, peripheral vascular diseases (including gangrene) and blindness.
Through the precise reasons are not clear, diabetes damages the lining of blood vessels (including the coronary arteries, which supply the heart with fresh blood) and alters the body’s handling of cholesterol and fat. The end- result is greatly accelerated development of heart disease and other related conditions are responsible for a very significant number of the life- impairing and life- threatening diseases in modern times.
The problem associated with detection of cardiovascular disease in patients with diabetes is linked to the fact that the disease is often ‘silent’. By the time the patient presents the heart disease to the doctor, the condition is usually advanced. In 35 per cent will suffer a heart attack when it is too late to prevent irreversible damage to the heart. It is surprising but well-documented finding that only about 30 per cent of patients will present to the doctor chest pain or other symptoms that can alert a doctor to the presence of cardiovascular disease. Even in this group, diabetic patients have a much poorer outlook than their non-diabetic counterparts.
Surgical treatment for coronary artery disease (coronary artery by-pass surgery) and angioplasty (opening up of narrowed arteries of the heart) are less often successful, repeat procedures are often necessary and the chance of failure of medical (tablet) treatments is high. For these reasons, Drs Brown and Goldstein (both) holders of Nobel Prizes for their work on cholesterol metabolism said, “if one waits for the one symptoms of heart disease, often the first symptom is sudden death, therefore, strategies for early detection of coronary disease are required”.
Highly prevalent worldwide, with World Health Organization projecting a stunning escalation by 2025, with much of the burden of disease failing on developing rather than developed nations, Diabetes is especially menacing for India as more than 70 per cent of the patients with diabetes are likely to die of a cardiovascular cause (mainly heart attack or stroke) eventually. The mortality from this condition in the developing countries will soon be at par with and probably exceed that due to infection (aids, tuberculosis and so on) or cancer.