Race and heart disease

Jane Elliott:

He didn't smoke, ate well and played sport, but Paratosh Sarkar was still one and a half times more at risk from heart disease.

Why? Simply because he is South Asian.

"This came as a bit of a shock to me, as I had always been particularly active. I always played tennis in the summer and in the winter I played badminton.

"I was always very fit," he said.

"The South Asian food is high in saturated fat; ghee is used a lot for cooking, but my family have always avoided that because they know it is not good for you."

Despite taking all the precautions Mr Sarkar, a nuclear engineer from Eltham, London, was found to have a blockage in the heart and needed an angioplasty (in which a catheter-guided balloon is used to open a narrowed coronary artery) and a stent (a tube to keep heart arteries open).

Heart disease is the UK's biggest killer, taking the lives of one-in-five men and one-in six women in the UK.

Among the South Asian community, those from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, this is an even greater problem with a much greater death rate from coronary heart disease (CHD) than the national average.

But despite this, 97% of South Asians do not realise they are at an increased risk because of their ethnicity.

A recent study showed that despite this nearly one-in-five South Asians do nothing to improve their heart health.

Heart Disease and South Asians

Much more needs to be done to tackle heart disease in South Asians in the United Kingdom