A consistent trend is indicated by nearly all significant studies, public health projections, physician clinical observations, and even insurance claims that prevalence of heart disease is increasing nationwide as well as in Telangana State. Among Indians, heart disease has emerged as the leading cause of death and a silent epidemic.
According to data from insurance aggregators, between 2019 and 2020, between 9 and 12 percent of health insurance treatment claims were related to heart disease. The steadily rising number of insurance claims is an indirect sign of the increase in heart disease. The incidence of cardiac problems in the general population was evidently reflected in the subsequent years, as insurance claims increased to 18% to 20% by 2023–2024.
According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) Accidental Deaths and Suicides India (ADSI)-2022 report, heart attack-related deaths increased by 12.5% in 2022. The NCRB data shows that heart attacks caused 28,413 deaths overall in 2021, rising to 32,457 deaths in 2022.
Interestingly, men are more likely than women to experience heart attacks that result in sudden death for a variety of reasons, such as stress, genetics, and an unpredictable lifestyle. Approximately six men have a potentially fatal heart attack for every woman who has a heart attack.
Over the same time period, 4,402 women and 28,005 men nationwide died suddenly from heart attacks. According to the Indian Heart Association’s report “Cardiac Disease among South Asians: A Silent Epidemic,” half of Indian men’s heart attacks happen before the age of fifty.
Men made for 8,670 of the 9,722 sudden fatalities from heart attacks in 2022 among those aged 30 to 45, while 1,049 women in the same age range experienced a potentially fatal heart attack. Similarly, 12,290 people in the 45–60 age range died from heart attacks in 2022, with 10,854 of those deaths being men and 1,436 being women.
According to NCRB-2022 statistics, 282 people in Telangana died from a sudden heart attack, with 257 of them being men and roughly 27 being women. Of the 176 fatal heart attack cases that occurred in Andhra Pradesh that year, 162 were in men and the remaining 14 were in women.
According to public health researchers like the Indian Heart and Stroke Association (IHSA), genetic predisposition, metabolic dysregulation, cardiomyopathy (weak heart muscle), meat consumption, saturated and trans fats, junk food, high levels of stress, and a sedentary lifestyle are the main factors that make Indians susceptible to heart disease.
-NSH Digidesk
