The heart attack increases numerically, so is reported in the professional journals from all over the world for quite some time. If one leafs thereupon once in medical statistics, one finds the confirmation for it in the exact numerical material. It is undisputed that the entire complex of cardiovascular diseases, which includes heart attacks, ranks first in the cause of death statistics in all highly industrialized countries.
Incidence of myocardial infarction
Infographic on the anatomy and causes of cardiovascular disease. Click image to enlarge. However, this statistical statement should not immediately put us in a panic mood, because we must not disregard the fact that, due to better medical treatment and measures of preventive health protection, other diseases, such as tuberculosis or even polio, which in earlier times predominantly led to death, do not weigh on the statistics in this respect at all today, or only very insignificantly. Over the years, this has led to a general shift in the importance of the individual diseases within the overall picture. However, life expectancy, i.e. the average age reached by people in a given country, also influences the outcome of the statistics on diseases and causes of death in a positive or negative sense. Diseases that affect older people in particular, including cardiovascular diseases, inevitably increase as people grow older, but also as the proportion of older people in the total population increases. This may lead to a numerical increase of some disease groups without being called an absolute increase. The assessment of a change in the incidence of a disease is only accurate in a statistical sense if the increase or decrease in groups of the same age can be demonstrated. In the past, myocardial infarction was regarded exclusively as a disease of the elderly that occurred as a result of age-related hardening of the arteries; today, on the contrary, myocardial infarction at the end of the fourth decade of life is no longer a rarity. This naturally raises the question: Are all people today more at risk than ever from this disease, or is the increased risk of infarction only for a special group of people? Does the type of workload and stress play a role, and what role does it play? Thus, a plethora of questions arise, the answers to which are not entirely straightforward because of the complexity of what is going on. It is very simple to assume that age-related changes in the heart and blood vessels are the cause of myocardial infarction, but this in no way explains the frequent occurrence of myocardial infarction in the younger years of life. It is only in individual cases that the hardening of the arteries is already so pronounced that it can be regarded as the cause of a heart attack. In recent years, the term “manager’s disease” has become an unmistakable catchword. It is meant to express that quite a lot of people, who lead a restless, rushed, stressful, at the same time one-sided life, as they do little physical activity, consume excessive food and luxury poisons and do not find time for balancing interests, are afflicted by considerable nervous disorders. These manifest themselves predominantly in general languor, listlessness, depressed mood, inner restlessness, high-grade sleep disturbances, increased excitability, as well as cardiovascular and gastrointestinal disturbances. Initially, only individual manifestations occur. However, if they are not compensated by a meaningful recovery period, they can lead to serious cardiovascular diseases and increase up to a heart attack.
Heart attack risk in men
Comparisons about the share of different occupational groups in men in this morbid event showed that those who have a physically stressful, even hard-working, job are less affected by heart attack than those who have a disorderly daily routine due to a mostly responsible and managerial job, in which the normal alternation of tension and relaxation is no longer ensured and symptoms of fatigue as well as temporary drops in performance during the day are often masked for years by indulgence toxins, such as nicotine and [coffee|caffeine]].Full-bodied people, whose circulation is more stressed as a result of this alone, are also more prone to heart attack than slim people. In many cases, the incidence of diseases such as lung cancer differs greatly between men and women. So how does it look with heart attacks? When differentiating the number of heart attacks according to gender, it was always found that men tend to have more heart attacks than women, and this is still the case today. However, if a woman suffers a heart attack, she has less chance than a man of surviving the disease, and her subsequent performance is usually more limited. If we consider once again which group of people among men is particularly at risk of heart attack, certain doubts arise as to whether women are really less at risk of heart attack. Couldn’t the previous results be based on the fact that far fewer women than men have been and still are in managerial positions, and the whole thing is a fallacy because women have had far fewer opportunities to have heart attacks via the nervous strain of work?
Heart attack risk in women
Often, a heart attack is based on a narrowing of the coronary arteries, which is called arteriosclerosis. If such a narrowing becomes blocked by a blood clot, all subsequent heart muscle areas are no longer supplied with blood and oxygen. The heart muscle then dies within a few hours. Click to enlarge. The “manager illness of the woman” expresses itself afterwards rather apart from nervous disturbances, like stronger irritability, anxiousness, headache, dizziness and palpitations, particularly by a strong sleeplessness. The woman suffers more than the man from the excess of work, because she is usually burdened with additional responsibility towards her family. She then tries with a lot of ambition and perseverance – sometimes also in exhausting night work – to solve the arising problems of job and family. Of course, this is only at the expense of her other free time and recreational periods, which she will again sacrifice at the expense of her night sleep. Stimulants, in the form of coffee or special medications, are therefore usually intended to keep her productive beyond normal levels, so that she can cope with all the work that arises. In the few hours she then has left for sleep, the entire nervous system is still in such a state of arousal that sleep can be neither deep nor restful. Truly restful sleep would only occur when the alarm clock is already calling for the fulfillment of morning duties before work begins and a new day with all its stresses has to be managed. We have all certainly experienced a night of insomnia, when thoughts come and go, minutes turn into hours, after an exciting evening when we had perhaps indulged in coffee to an even greater extent. We know how grueling such a night is, and we also know that the following day will not want to end. If the shortened sleep time is not an exception, but almost a permanent condition, it leads over the increasing sleep deficit to all nervous phenomena in the sense of the manager illness naturally also with the woman. With it is not to be expressed at all that we want to come also in punkto heart attack to the equality with the man. On the contrary, if women or men, wherever they may work, cope with the demands made on them on the basis of their training and upbringing, do not put a one-sided strain on their organism, do not “fatten themselves up” through excessive nutrition and thus psychologically and statically upset the regulation of the circulatory system, then the frequency of heart attacks in men and women will not increase, but will decrease more and more in the future.
