India has the highest incidence of heart related diseases in the world and the number of those affected is likely to double in the coming years, a leading cardiologist said on Wednesday.
"If no initiative is taken to check the disease, the most predictable and also preventable among all chronic diseases, India will have 62 million patients with heart disease by 2015, compared to 16 million in the US," Enas A Enas, Director, CADI (Coronary Artery Disease among Asian Indians) Research Foundation, California said.
He said the rate of heart attacks among Indians younger than 45 years of age in the last three years was five times higher than in other populations.
Indians who go abroad run the risk of getting heart attacks four times more than others, he said.
"If urgent preventive steps are not taken, heart attack deaths in India are likely to double by 2015," he said.
The percentage of people having heart disease had increased from 1-2 to 3-5 per cent in rural India and from 2-3 to 10-11 per cent in urban India. This represented an overall increase of 300 per cent over the past 30 years, he said.
In the same period, deaths from heart attacks decreased by 65 per cent in the US and many other countries mainly due to nationwide control of risk factors like smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and physical inactivity, Enas, currently on a five-week tour of India, said.
He will head a team of cardiology experts of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin at the first Indo-US health summit at New Delhi from December 14.
