Childhood heartache: Has our lifestyle become the enemy of innocent heartbeats?

The incidence of heart attacks among children in India is increasing rapidly. This is related to the changing lifestyle of children, their eating habits, mental stress and screen time. This danger can be prevented only through regular health checkups in schools, yoga, nutrition education and awareness among parents. This is not just a health issue, but a national warning.

- Priyanka Saurabh

Whenever we hear the word "heart attack", we imagine a middle-aged person of fifty-sixty-five years of age engrossed in a hectic life, laden with stress and fatigue. But today the reality is much more frightening and shocking than this. Today heart attacks are not only haunting adults, but also innocent children. Such news is coming from many parts of the country, where children going to school suddenly fall down and doctors call it "cardiac arrest" or "sudden heart failure". Is this just a coincidence? Or has our lifestyle attacked the little hearts?

In the last few months, many such incidents have come to light from across the country, which confirm the seriousness of this threat. The latest case is from Barwani district of Madhya Pradesh, where an innocent eight-year-old girl fell and died as soon as she reached the school gate. Earlier, incidents of death of school children due to heart attack have also been reported from states like Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi, Maharashtra. According to the Indian Medical Journals, there has been a 35% increase in cases of sudden cardiac arrest deaths among children under the age of 18 between 2021 and 2022. In the year 2022 alone, 32,457 youths died of heart attack in India. A large number of these were teenagers between 10 and 18 years of age.