Why are more young adults facing cardiac issues?

The other day, I came across an article that said Gen Z is becoming the most health-conscious generation yet. They are reading food labels, embracing fitness, talking openly about mental wellbeing and taking a far greater interest in preventive health than generations before them. I found that genuinely heartening. Every generation deserves the chance to rewrite the health story it inherits.

Yet, there is one trend that continues to trouble me. Across our hospitals, we are seeing more heart attacks in people in their 20s and 30s. It feels deeply at odds with the growing awareness that so many young people are embracing. The question, therefore, is no longer whether young people care about their health. It is whether they are paying enough attention to the organ that matters most.

For decades, we associated heart attacks with a certain image. A man in his 60s, perhaps overweight, perhaps a lifelong smoker, collapsing after years of warning signs his body had been sending. That image no longer holds. Cardiologists across India are now seeing patients in their 20s and 30s, many of them fit, and many without any family history that would explain it. The heart, it seems, is ageing faster than the rest of us.

Several threads come together to explain this shift, though no single one tells the whole story. Our lifestyles have changed dramatically in a single generation. Long hours at a desk, meals eaten in a hurry or skipped altogether, sleep treated as negotiable, and stress that never quite switches off. Add to this the rise in smoking and vaping among young adults, rising rates of diabetes and high cholesterol appearing earlier than they used to, and a worrying tendency to dismiss fatigue, chest discomfort or breathlessness as something that will settle with rest.

There is also a genetic layer that we are only beginning to understand better. Indians, as a population, tend to develop heart disease at a younger age and with greater severity than many other ethnic groups, even when traditional risk factors appear modest. This makes early screening far more important for us.

The numbers themselves trouble me less than the silence around them. Young people rarely think of their hearts as vulnerable. Chest discomfort gets blamed on acidity or muscle strain. Breathlessness gets blamed on being out of shape. A racing heartbeat gets blamed on stress or too much coffee. By the time these signals are taken seriously, the disease has been quietly progressing for years.

There is another aspect of this conversation that deserves equal attention. Cardiologists often remind us that not every heart attack leads to cardiac arrest. But when it does, every minute matters. Calling for emergency medical help immediately and starting CPR without delay can significantly improve the chances of survival until advanced medical care arrives. Every minute without CPR reduces those chances. Teaching more people this simple, lifesaving skill could save thousands of lives each year. This is not just a medical priority. It is a public health imperative.

At our hospitals, we are seeing an encouraging shift. More young adults are coming forward for preventive heart evaluations, often before they develop symptoms. We have expanded screening programmes for younger age groups because identifying risk early can alter the course of disease long before it becomes an emergency. Prevention is gradually becoming part of the conversation, and that may be one of the most important changes we are witnessing.

Young people have always been associated with possibility. It should never be mistaken for protection. A healthy heart is not preserved by age alone. It is protected by the choices we make, the risks we recognise and the action we take before disease has a chance to announce itself. The greatest gift we can give our hearts is not treatment when something goes wrong, but attention while everything still feels right.

Dr Preetha Reddy is Executive Vice Chairperson of Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Limited.