Anecdotally I’m in my late-thirties, fit, don’t work crazy hours or live unhealthily and I had a heart attack a week ago today.
Being sedentary obviously doesn’t help matters and I’d suspect in terms of risk factors working long hours without moving much is worse than working long hours whilst active but we can’t defend that with anecdotes.
I'm in my mid thirties, I think I'm fit, but constantly hear of "fit" people suffering heart attacks at this age.
Fitness wise I was swimming five days a week at a pretty good intensity. I’m pretty competitive so tend to push myself and as a sense of exertion my breast stroke pace is faster than most people’s freestyle. But this is just a local pool not some crazy swimming club. On top of that I make sure I do all the usual things like getting up from my desk regularly, take a walk at lunchtime and I have two young kids so usually we are going on hikes and bike rides at the weekend.
I don’t smoke, I eat reasonably healthily, I don’t drink loads of coffee, I work from home, my job isn’t too stressful and so on.
The only related history is that my father had a TIA aka “mini-stroke” at a similar age.
I’m back at home now but was in hospital for five days. So far recovery seems to be going well, lots of resting with a couple of walks each day that get progressively longer. It’ll still be a few weeks before I’ll be doing anything more. Emotionally I still feel very raw, much more so than any of the other times I’ve knowingly come close to dying.
I basically bottom out the risk factors for heart attack yet here we are.
* https://www.statnews.com/2021/05/14/setting-the-record-strai...
> Over the ensuing months, numerous research groups published studies that refuted the early concerns and provided reassuring evidence that SARS-CoV-2 had no extra toxicity to the heart
I have clotting issues. Genetic problem. Factor 5 + autoimmune.
I get a lot of symptoms if I lapse on blood thinners, so can easily tell when I’m having a mini stroke.
Covid dramatically worsened the situation. That was six months ago.
Before I could go off blood thinners for 3 days before symptoms started.
Now if I’m late by six hours problems start.
Just concerning the breast stroke: I started to go swimming half a year ago and for lack of technique I did breast stroke instead of freestyle. After a couple months of 30min of swimming every day, I suddenly got terrible back pain during swimming (due the the backwards bent spine I guess). I started to learn freestyle and did not encounter the problems again. Just yesterday I did some breast stroke and I almost instantly got the pain again. Did you ever encounter this kind of back pain, or is it only my physiology?
Switching up stroke is generally a good idea though.