WEIGHT AND WATCH

India stands at the epicentre of parallel epidemics: obesity, diabetes and heart disease, each fuelling the other and blurring the line between lifestyle and disease. But there is hope-GLP-1 therapies are transforming the treatment landscape

- By Pooja Biraia Jaiswal

At 43, Sophia Purohit believed she understood her body. A type 2 diabetic since her mid-20s, with a family his- tory of diabetes and heart disease, she had spent nearly two decades navigating medications, sugar charts, doc- tors' visits and lifestyle tweaks. “I was the go-to medical person in my family,” she says. “I thought I knew it all.”

In January 2024, just days after returning from a family holiday in Shimla that included paragliding and trekking, she developed a dull, persistent chest pain. She dismissed it as severe acidity after gorging at a Parsi Navjote in Navsari, Gujarat. The pain lingered through the night and during the drive back to Mumbai.

By the time she walked into the emergency room at Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital in Mumbai, her ECG was already capturing a catastrophe in progress. “While the ECG was happening, I had a massive heart attack,” she re- calls. “People started running around me. That’s when I knew this wasn’t gas.”

Purohit would later learn that she had likely suf- fered two heart attacks within a week—one pos- sibly during the holiday, and the second inside the hospital. Angiography revealed four ma- jor blockages; one artery was 99 per cent blocked and required an immediate stent. Significant portions of her heart muscle had died. Her heart's pumping capacity had dropped to 20 per cent, far below the normal 60 per cent.

“I had to buy a wheelchair,” she says. “For six months, I couldn’t walk from my bedroom to the liv- ing room without collapsing.”

The turning point came when Purohit's cardiologist drew a hard line: her heart would not recover unless her diabetes was aggressively controlled.

“I kept resisting,” she admits. “I thought, ‘why is a cardiac doctor talking about my diabetes?’ I already had a renowned diabetologist.”