Your mind has more to do with your heart than you have been led to believe

Atherosclerosis is a chronic illness leading to gradual obstruction of various blood vessels in the body. For those who are genetically predisposed to develop atherosclerosis, this could start as early as in the first decade of life. This was shown in the post-mortem aorta obtained from African-American children killed in the crossfire during the Los Angles riots. Advanced coronary artery blocks, in all the three major epicardial vessels, were observed to have profuse collateral connections in a sizeable number of young soldiers shot dead during the Korean and the Vietnam Wars. The post-mortem angiograms in these 205 soldiers showed significant obstruction to the coronary vessels in the majority.

They could easily have qualified for bypass grafting in the commercial cardiological world.

This goes to show that atherosclerotic blocks do not start after the fourth decade of life to produce various vascular accidents.

Although time evolution in a dynamic organism, like the human body which is continuously fuelled by food and oxygen, depends on the total initial knowledge of the organism's body characteristics, like body mass index, serum cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc, it might not validate future predictions. To complicate matters further, doctors do not, and can not, understand the total initial state of any human being with the tools at their disposal to acquire such knowledge.

Quantum physics, having realised the importance of the human mind in understanding the subatomic world, now places great emphasis on the importance of mind over matter in the affairs of the universe. A similar trend is needed in medicine too. The new science of chaos looks at man as a whole, mind included.

More and more studies in the medical field now point to the fact that human behaviour, human emotions, psychosocial factors and inter-personal relations have a larger impact in bringing about diseases ranging from common cold to cancer. There have been studies of students’ hostile behaviour vis-à-vis the atherosclerotic process in their coronary vessels. These clearly indicated that the process of atherosclerosis has a direct bearing on the hostility score even in students as young as 15 to 20 years.

When it comes to vascular accidents, be it a stroke, heart-attack or a peripheral vessel block, the obstructions to the vessels are not as important as the role played by instantaneous blood clots totally blocking the vessel lumen. Even under these circumstances, all the known risk factors pale into insignificance, compared to the emotional and psychosocial factors. Hostility, anger, depression, hatred and lack of social support came up as independent risk factors in the studies. Conventional risk factors like cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes and smoking did not have a major say in the final assault.

An important area of research in the latter field has been job stress. Suffice it to say that the human mind plays a pivotal role in initiating and modulating atherosclerosis on a long-term basis; in addition, the mind brings on the final clot at the final moment of assault.

With the government funds dying up for research even in the advanced West, drug companies and instrument manufacturers are the ones that primarily fund medical research. There are only two ongoing randomised trials under way in this area.

While the first-ever ‘Diet-Heart Study’ in Framingham, having spent $110 million of tax payers’ money, came up with a negative result, showing no relationship between the diet and heart disease at the end of five years, the ‘heart-food’ industry in America, which had by then invested billions of dollars in producing ‘heart-healthy food’, saw to it that the ‘Diet-Heart Study’ results were never published. Big business made billions of dollars of profit by selling cholesterol lowering drugs.

All of them, including the latest statins, at the end of the day, have sent more people to meet their maker in Heaven. Now we know that “it is not what you eat that kills you, but it is what eats you that kills you.”

(Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS.)