Young, Fit and Having a Heart Attack: Why Age Won't Protect You

In this informative video, we explore the concerning trend of heart attacks in younger individuals. While there's no official age definition for "young" heart attack patients, most medical studies classify those under 45-55 years old in this category.

You'll learn how heart attacks occur when blood supply to the heart muscle is cut off, causing oxygen deprivation and cell death that releases cardiac enzymes into the bloodstream. We explain common symptoms like chest pain, shortness of breath, sweating, and palpitations, while noting that approximately 20% of heart attacks happen silently without symptoms.

The video highlights important differences in how heart attacks present in younger people:
- Over half of young patients discover they have heart disease during their first heart attack
- Young patients often experience no warning chest pain in the month before the attack
- Many young people suffer heart attacks during strenuous exercise

We explain the various mechanisms behind heart attacks in younger individuals, including plaque rupture, traveling clots, arterial spasms (often drug-induced), and spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD), which accounts for one-third of pregnancy-related heart attacks.

The video covers risk factors common across all age groups like obesity, high cholesterol, and diabetes, while emphasizing those especially relevant to younger people: smoking, family history, inherited clotting disorders, structural heart abnormalities, psychosocial factors, oral contraceptives, chronic inflammation, and certain infections including hepatitis C, Chlamydia, HIV, and COVID-19.