Cardiac Sector in India

Dr K M Cherian, Chairman and CEO, Frontier Lifeline Hospital, Chennai, talks about the current sector of the cardiac sector, the challenges invloved and the way ahead

- Dr K M Cherian

India has seen a dramatic change in disease burden over the last two to three decades, changing from communicable disease to non-communicable disease (NCD), with cardiovascular disease (CVD) causing the largest cause of mortality, accounting for half of all deaths from NCDs. CVD' is the fastest growing illness in India at more than nine per cent annually. The incidence of CVDs in the age group of 25 to 69 is close to 25 per cent. The age standardised mortality in 2005 for developing countries like India was 300-450 per 100,000 whereas it was 100200 per 100,000 for developed nations like the US and Japan.

India has progressed well in treating CVDs, with major milestones such as legalisation of brain death and transplants taking place as early as 1994. India is also one of the countries where cardiac stem cell research is progressing at a fast pace, and our country has one of the largest series of cardiac stem cell studies in the world. Work on artificial hearts, synthetic biology, biomaterials, clustered regularly inter spaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) technology applications for cardiac care etc are progressing in our country, though some of these are at early stages. While we are technologically advanced and at par with developed nations, affordability and reaching out to wider patient population remains a big challenge.

Growth in India’s younger working population is also posing challenges we have not seen before. High stress levels, unhealthy and sedentary lifestyle, increased intake of processed foods, increased to bacco / alcohol use etc are giving rise to other co-morbidities like diabetes, hypertension and dyslipidemia / obesity which in turn accelerated the growth of CVDs in India and incidence of premature deaths.