Secrets of Heart Attacks

 

Secrets of Heart Attacks

Man is very certain when he knows a little, with knowledge doubt increases said Goethe. How true! Doctors have been telling patients that there are risk factors which lead to heart attacks such as high cholesterol high sugar and many others (A whopping total of 283 risk factors are listed in medical textbooks).

Unfortunately, the polling project data of six large-scale studies conducted over 10 years in the USA revealed the shocking truth that among the people who had suffered heart attack in the follow-up period, 90 per cent had one or no risk factor at all. Among those that started with six or more risk factors. Only 10 per cent had heart attacks in the next ten years. Many other studies including the recent Helsinki study clearly demonstrated the futility of our going after the so-called risk factor only, although it would not be a bad idea to avoid these risk factors to the extent possible.

I have been writing on this topic for the last two decades and was quite convinced that there is something more to the entire mater than what meets the eye. “Man seethes what the wisest” is an apt adage. We body parameters that we know how to measure. I always felt that nature kept the secrets very close to its bosom and our genetic background probably has a lot more to with our fate on this planet than all the risk factors put together.

It was heartening to note in a recent study published in the prestigious scientific journal. Nature which demonstrated the presence of an abnormal gene in people who get heart attack without having any of the known risk factors (Nature 1992, 359 ; 641-44).

 Such a study does not belittle the role played by environmental factors such as tobacco smoke. Abnormal genes can penetrate and produce a disease only in the company of environmental factors, If an individual inherits the abnormal gene predisposing him to a heart attack. His smoking will advance the time so onset of the diseases. If he abstains from smoking, he will probably get a heart attack in his eighth or ninth decade when a silent heart attack is the best way to meet one’s maker.

Most modern scientific data seem to corroborate the good old Indian wisdom that a person has to die at the predetermined time but lead certain codes of conduct in food habits and also in his social behavior. Nature cannot be that foolish as not to know how to keep an organism going in spite of minor changes within or without the organism.

The high-tech medical world seems to have forgotten the foregoing golden rule. Writing about the latest interventional techniques in heart to offer (B.H. Jr. October 1992 , p. 423): It seems that the greater the subsequent loss.