India is a diverse country, whether the diversity is in culture, religion, eating habits, or exercising habits. Earlier, there was this notion that if you eat healthy and exercise daily, your heart will stay healthy. The heart is an organ that needs to beat continuously so that every organ can get oxygenated blood to function. To let it function properly, one needs to take care of it. The effects of your daily lifestyle have a major impact on your heart, and along with that, heredity and environmental factors play a role in heart health. If you compare the day-to-day lives of 21st and 20th-century individuals, a massive difference in their eating and working habits will be inevitable. The difference in time showed the fast-paced life evolution where exercise habits have also changed. There were gyms earlier as well, but for boxers or sports people. Common people’s physical labor was cycling or walking to anywhere they went.

Most of them didn’t have machinery such as bikes, cars, etc. But physical exercise is not the only way to protect your heart; it involves multiple factors. Let’s see what the other factors are. One of them is eating healthy, which is another way to reduce consumption of processed food, less sugar, and less saturated fats or trans fats, as these will gradually lead to increased obesity, blockages in heart vessels, and the heart having to struggle for every beat, eventually leading to a heart attack.

The environment also has its effects on overall health as well as on heart health. Most people are aware of these facts but choose to ignore them. Some do care; they eat healthy and they workout, but what went wrong was that they got a heart attack. Sometimes, when everything is right, there is something wrong hiding behind that right. Changes in the working lifestyle and trying to be ahead of the competitive nature of today’s generation have left no space to relax and calm down. This not only affects their health but also their relationships with family and loved ones.

Thus, a lot of emotions are piling up in the form of stress, which is one of the major reasons for heart attacks in people who have a balanced diet and exercise. Not only that, but stress – smoking and alcohol consumption—and lack of sleep also contribute to it. For adults, at least – 8 hours of sound sleep is required.

“Eat right, sleep tight, and exercise light” should be the new life mantra for this generation”. Apart from this yearly checkup of your heart, invest in certain basic tests like an electrocardiogram, an echocardiogram, and a stress test (exercise tolerance test (ETT) or treadmill test) and certain advanced tests like cardiac CT, chest x- ray and Thallium scan (myocardial perfusion scintigraphy) as per your physician’s recommendations on the basis of your blood test and symptoms, if any. So, you can make it a habit to visit your physician once or twice a year to keep up with your heart health.

This discovery suggests we should change public health messages. Instead of pushing intense daily exercise for everyone, we should focus on personalized, moderate, and varied physical activities. It encourages us to tune into our bodies, to find equilibrium between activity and rest, and to recognize that health includes physical, mental, and emotional aspects. By doing this, we aim for a healthier life that reduces risks and embraces overall well-being. It also shows how important
scientific research is in updating our knowledge about what’s best for our health. “Fit to Fail” reminds us that real health is not simple.

Author’s biography

Dr. Soumya Singh, Head of Partnerships at InnovatioCuris, is a healthcare expert with a postgraduate degree in Health and Hospital Management and a background in dentistry. Her articles provide valuable insights into healthcare administration

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Sometimes you might feel a pressure or burning sensation in your chest, or other types of general uncomfortable situations that will indicate something is not right. Experiencing chest pain rarely is nothing to be afraid of as it might be an indication of improper digestion. However, when the feeling becomes frequent, you need to take precautionary measures. Numerous causes are associated with chest pain and it’s advised to seek immediate medical health if the sensation becomes too hard to bear. 

While chest pain is an indication of heart problems, other internal organs in your body can also be the cause for the pain. Despite the causes, you need to be aware of the symptoms. The generic causes of chest pain include:

Heart-Related Causes 

Heart issues are the primary cause of severe and mild chest pain. Over 15% of adults in the United States suffer from Coronary Artery disease, which is a common heart disease. When you have this heart disease, blood won’t be able to flow into your heart properly. An insufficient supply of blood in the heart can make you feel a sharp chest pain known as angina. This pain can spread from your heart to your arms, back, and other body parts. 

Most people associate heart attacks when they experience even minor symptoms of chest pain. When your body suffers a heart attack, blood could not reach your heart. You will feel your chest being squeezed or crushed. If you feel any type of chest pain, call 911 immediately. 

Lung-Related Causes 

Lung pain is closely associated with chest pain. Pleurisy is a common case when a thin membrane will cover your entire lungs and make them inflamed. When you develop pleurisy inflammation, you will feel tenderness and sharp pain when taking deep breaths or coughing. This sheer pain in your chest might get worsened over time, especially if you don’t consider treatments. 

Some pains associated with your lungs will require immediate medical attention. Pulmonary embolism is one of the most common causes. This situation takes place when one lung’s arteries form a blood clot. Problems in breathing along with sheer burning sensations in your chest are the symptoms. 

Muscle-Related Causes 

If you have been exercising at the gym before, you will know the feeling of muscle soreness. Muscle soreness can affect every part of your body, including the chest muscles, especially when they are inflamed. Trauma can also affect the chest muscles, causing chest pain or a burning sensation. Lifting heavy weights incorrectly and coughing vigorously can also cause chest pain. As per Everyday Health, muscle soreness is normal after light weights. 

Stress-Related Causes 

When you’re stressed about something, feeling extremely worried, vulnerable, and restless is normal. However, depending on your stress level, your mental health conditions will go through massive changes. These negative emotions will create a feeling of tightness in your chest, which will prevent you from breathing properly.

To summarise we can understand that chest pain can take place in the upper section of your body for various reasons, including heart and lung problems. It can also spread to other parts of the body quickly. You should always take symptoms of chest pain seriously and seek medical attention.

“Composed by: Kristen Smith is a Social Media Expert. She is passionate about new technology & gadgets. She shares her tips on business & marketing.”

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The critical care environment has undergone significant alterations in the past several years. This has happened because our lifestyles in the fast-paced lives of modern India are ensuring that most people, in the age group of 30-50 years are falling prey to life-threatening cardiac diseases and strokes, in addition to diabetes, hypertension, cancers, liver, kidney and lung diseases – these diseases being called Non-Communicable Diseases or NCDs. They are now responsible for killing more than 65% of our population says Dr Arvind Lal, known for his diagnostic labs across the country.

Flagging concerns on such trends, these patients need high-cost intensive care, be it for complications of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, hypertension, cancer or lung diseases. This is where the importance of Point-of-care testing (POCT) comes in. It helps in almost diagnosing the patient instantly and improves the physician’s ability to take immediate corrective action and decreases hospital stay. One such test is Troponin – that has revolutionized cardiac care by diagnosing heart attacks or myocardial infarction.

This article is based on the keynote address on the occasion of 2nd Annual International InnoHEALTH Conference 2017 – ‘Transforming Healthcare Through Innovation’ in New Delhi, said there are numerous promising diagnostic technologies. The key message is that in a country where 70% of the population lives in rural surroundings, ‘it is our duty to rapidly adopt disruptive innovative affordable technologies including telemedicine. Thus, our underserved population would be able to avail of the best treatment possible and bring in massive visible change’. He said the importance of bringing quality healthcare needs no reminder and the time has come for India to change the direction of healthcare for the masses.

Healthcare is a right – and access to good healthcare should not depend on where one lives and how much he or she earns. But sadly, that is exactly what plagues India’s healthcare today, he lamented. India faces a severe shortage of both hard infrastructure and talent. With about one doctor and one functional bed per 1000 population, healthcare is truly underserved in India. Add to this the regional imbalances and variations in healthcare delivery. The healthcare infrastructure is skewed towards urban over rural India.

Although rural India accounts for about 70% of the population, it has less than one-third of the nation’s hospitals, doctors and beds, resulting in large disparities in health outcomes across urban and rural India. British Medical Journal (BMJ) has observed that there is a remarkable saving of lives in India if good healthcare facilities consisting of operation theatres, surgeons, anaesthetists, blood banks are available within 50 kilometres of the patient providing quality medical services within the ‘golden hour’.

Though there has been a sea change in the last five decades, India now needs to reinvent the field of diagnostics as laboratory tests are responsible for 70% of all clinical or medical decisions.

In today’s life where internet rules the roost, the patients have become very knowledgeable, thanks to the globalisation of healthcare, and are demanding very high-quality healthcare for themselves. They are insisting on a very wholesome and satisfying experience rather than being told that the ‘treatment is over’.

Soon, a time will come when the tests shall be ordered by the patients based on clinical history and clinical findings that shall be answered by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) application. Artificial intelligence has already found several areas in healthcare from the design of treatment plans to assist in repetitive jobs to medication management and drug designing. The most obvious application of artificial intelligence in healthcare is data management. Collecting it, storing it, normalizing it, tracing its lineage – it may well be the first step in revolutionizing the existing healthcare systems.

Recently, the AI research branch of the search giant, Google, launched its Google Deepmind Health project, which is used to mine the data of medical records in order to provide better and faster health services. The project is in its initial phase, and at present, they are working with Moorfields Eye Hospital of NHS Foundation Trust, UK to improve eye treatment.

Just a few years ago the patient after giving the sample used to come back in the evening to the lab to collect a physical copy of the test report. This was replaced by making the report available on the internet that could be downloaded by the patient in the comfort of his home. These days this has been further replaced by making available an App on his mobile phone wherein he can book an appointment for the sample to be collected at home and the report being later available on the same mobile App.

‘IBM Watson, whose headquarters I had the privilege of visiting a few months back in the Silicon Valley, is an AI-based engine that has launched its special program for oncologists to provide clinicians evidence-based treatment options. The program has an advanced ability to analyze the meaning and context of structured and unstructured data in clinical notes and reports in its encyclopedic memory that may be critical to selecting a treatment pathway’. IBM launched another algorithm called Medical Sieve. It is an ambitious long-term exploratory project to build a next-generation ‘cognitive health assistant’ that is able to analyze radiology images to spot and detect abnormalities faster and more reliably. This shall help radiologists in the future to look at the most complicated cases where human supervision is essential.

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The lab-on-a-chip (LOC) is another device that integrates one or several laboratory functions on a single integrated circuit (commonly called a “chip”) of only a few square centimetres to achieve automation and high throughput screening. Imagine that a patient comes to one of our 2,100 collection centres in the remote tier three or tier four towns in India with the high fever. We take a drop of blood from his finger and inform the clinician almost immediately that the patient is suffering from Chikungunya and not from Malaria or Typhoid, or Dengue fever or Japanese Encephalitis – all in a matter of minutes! The driving notion behind POCT is to bring the test conveniently and immediately to the patient. Needless to add, the patient’s data by POCT shall be made available to update the patient’s electronic health records (EHR).

Talking about POCT Instruments: Currently, two broad type of POCT instruments are available: Small benchtop analyzers (for example, blood gas and electrolyte systems) and handheld, single-use devices (such as urine albumin, blood glucose, and coagulation tests). Now let us talk about if POCT is Boon or Bane? The strong point of POCT is speed and the rapidity with which it shall save lives in emergencies. As India marches towards quality healthcare delivery, in course of time regulatory compliances shall have to be adhered to in the interest of the patient’s health.

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