Coronary Artery Disease in South Asians | The risk factors and how to reduce risk

[upbeat music] So coronary artery disease in South Asians is a huge, huge problem, and we've recognized this for a very long time.

Why is it that South Asians who are from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh, but also South Asians who are living abroad from any of these places, have the highest incidence of coronary artery disease in the world? And this has been a real point of interest and, uh, concern.

Here we go.

The prevalence of the heart disease is so high that in non-Asians, okay, in the United States, there's a two point five percent coronary artery disease risk.

But if you look at South Asians who are living here or living in India, it's seven point five percent.

So it's almost a three times higher risk of having heart disease, and this has been documented over and over again.

It's a huge problem.

And if you look at coronary artery disease in India, in non-diabetic patients, there's eleven percent coronary artery disease risk, and in diabetics it's twenty-one percent.

Folks, this is so high that this is of extreme concern to us.

This eleven percent, in my opinion, is actually an underestimation because that just means that they haven't diagnosed diabetes in the other patients.

So what is diabetes? Diabetes is when your blood sugar is really high.

Your hemoglobin A1c is high, your blood sugars are greater than hundred and twenty-six.

But non-diabetics, they contain a lot of pre-diabetics.

And one of the things you're gonna learn in this slide presentation is the pre-diabetics who have the very high incidence of coronary artery disease.

It's the hyperinsulinemia which is so prevalent in the South Asians that actually causes this problem.

So it's not just diabetes, it's als- also prediabetes.

So I made a note down here which clearly states that non-diabetic risk is eleven percent in India because many of those actually have prediabetes, not just diabetes.

So moving on.

Indians in the United States have the same rate of coronary artery disease as Indians living in India as well.

So this was a study that was done in the UK, Singapore, Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji, and in Trinidad.

And in the United States, compared to the Caucasian populations, they have four times more hospitalizations for coronary artery disease.

They have up to four times more complications of the same disease as well.

And they have up to ten times more disease than those who are under the age of forty.

You know, I've seen this in my practice all along, that when they get hospitalized, the outcomes are much poorer.

And people say that, "Oh, yeah, yeah, because their arteries are smaller." They're not smaller.