Eight years ago, when Tyrone Morris was about to close the
retail store he managed in Milwaukee, he came to the end of an aisle and found
a 9mm pistol pointed at his right temple.
“You know what time it is,” the assailant said. “Time to
give me all the money in this store or I’ll kill you.” Morris handed over the
money, but the danger didn’t stop. “My heart was pounding so fast,” he says. “I
couldn’t breathe, and I had pain all through my chest.”
Though he was a former
college basketball player and pro hopeful, his weight had crept up from 190 to
320 since he’d been in his 20s, and he’d been ignoring some other issues for
months—shortness of breath, chest pressure, unexplained weight gain, trouble
getting down the court during pickup basketball games. Three days after the stickup,
he finally called a clinic and discovered he had full-blown heart disease. At
age 33. And he’s one of many guys who never thought in a million years they’d
have a heart attack in their 30s.
“It used to be incredibly rare to see anyone under age 40
come in with a heart attack—and some of these people are now in their 20s and
early 30s,” says Ron Blankstein, M.D., a preventive cardiologist at Brigham and
Women’s Hospital in Boston. “Based on what we’re seeing, we’re moving in the
wrong direction.”
What's happening in guys under 40?
Sorry, we should have led with the good news: If you’re a middle-aged
or older guy, the chances of your having a heart attack are as low as they’ve
been in decades. (Thanks, Lipitor!) Even in much older people—the 65-plus
crowd—there’s been a nearly 40 percent drop in heart-attack hospitalizations in
the past 20 years. But according to a study presented at the American College
of Cardiology meeting last spring, people who’ve yet to hit the big four-oh are
bucking that trend, experiencing higher heart-attack rates than ever.
The number of victims in their 20s and 30s has been rising
over the past two decades, and scientists have even seen atherosclerosis, the
arterial damage and blockages that cause serious heart events, in the arteries
of men in their teens and 20s. What’s driving the scary stats? Experts have four
theories:
We’re getting heavier earlier, and we stay that way
The percentage of obese kids and adolescents in the U. S.
has tripled since the 1970s, and the weight is hard to drop as an adult for
many reasons, including hanging on to a teen fast-food habit. A CDC survey
found that guys aged 20 to 39 are 82 percent more likely to eat fast food than
men 60 and older, which means they’re getting more calories without as many
nutrients in them. A generational slowdown in physical activity, especially due
to more time on screens and behind the wheel, also keeps weight on and hardens
arteries.
Those extra pounds are tough on your heart, and not just
because they make your whole body work harder. Fat around your middle may
actually release chemicals that lead to inflammation, which can cause buildups
in your arteries to break off, wedge into arteries further downstream, and impair
blood flow to your heart.
Younger guys are smoking—and vaping—more
Sure, overall smoking rates have fallen, especially among
the over-65 crowd, who have finally gotten around to kicking the habit. But
among 25- to 44-year-olds, there are still a whole lot of smokers—twice as many
as in the older demographic—and they have the cardiovascular health to show for
it.
It takes only one cigarette a day to boost a man’s risk of
coronary artery disease by nearly 50 percent, according to a recent BMJ study.
And people who think they can avoid that risk by vaping or Juuling are fooling
themselves. E-cig users push their heart-disease risk 40 percent higher than
that of nonusers; stroke risk jumps 71 percent.
Stress hits earlier
While every generation swears it’s living in the most
stressful times ever, an American Psychological Association survey found 22- to
39-year-olds to be the most stressed-out group of all. Stress may aggravate
inflammation in coronary arteries, which can lead to blood clots. It also has a
way of provoking high blood pressure and bad health habits, including comfort
eating, excessive drinking, and abandoned workouts. It’s a global issue: A
study of 52 countries saw that people who reported permanent stress at work or
home had more than twice the risk of a heart attack.
Just look at Trymaine Lee, a national correspondent for
MSNBC and a relatively new dad, who was trying to be an involved father while
performing his job at a high level. “I do all kinds of disturbing
stories—crime, shootings of unarmed black people—but I kept it all in a box,
tried not to think about certain things.” The stress of the job and a hectic
travel schedule made healthy eating and regular exercise tough, putting extra
pressure on his heart. The organ may have already been more vulnerable to
trouble, since heart-disease risk is disproportionately high in
African-Americans.
All of that likely added up to the nearly 100 percent
blockage that woke him up in the middle of the night in July 2017, at age 38,
feeling as if he had a beach ball in his chest that was being inflated to the
point of explosion. He went to the hospital fearing his life was over. Having
made it through, he’s now diligent about what he eats on assignment and
deadline, not bottling things up, and spending time with his wife and
seven-year-old daughter.
There’s a tendency to ignore obvious heart attack risks and symptoms
The heart-attack symptoms that alarm a 70-year-old don’t
stir someone who’s 30—even if they include classics like persistent nausea and
serious sweating, or the beach-ball-in-the-chest feeling—because he’s sure a
heart attack isn’t happening to him.
Even doctors can be in age-related denial. According to Dr.
Blankstein, they may be less likely to prescribe cholesterol-lowering statins
or clot-preventing aspirin therapy to younger men. If your doctor isn’t paying
attention, you should be; if your risk factors and labs show you’re a candidate
for heart trouble, make sure to talk about what changes you might need.
Risk factors you should be paying attention to that you can
control: High blood pressure, high cholesterol, excess weight, diabetes,
recreational drug use, smoking, physical inactivity, high levels of stress,
heavy alcohol use, unhealthy diet. You can't control your age, your family
history, or your ethnic group (heart attack risk tends to be higher among
people who are African-American, Mexican-American, Native American, native
Hawaiian, and Indian-American), so if yours put you at high risk, you should
pay extra attention to factors you can control.
Tyrone Morris got a break, even though it took him three
days to call a clinic. He’s now on the heart-transplant list, wearing an
implanted pump called HeartMate 3, because his own diseased organ is
permanently compromised. He lost weight, started playing basketball again, and
moved to a job he finds to be lower stress—owning his own restaurant,
BigCountry’s BBQ in Milwaukee, which uses a sauce made without salt or sugar. (It
still sells out most days.)
Being young for your first heart attack doesn’t mean you’ll
recover just fine: Your chances of a second one (and of stroke or death) are as
bad as older guys’. So all those things your dad is doing—the workouts, the new
interest in good food, figuring out how to reduce stress? Join him.
Credits: Peter Moore
Men’s Health
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