Summarised by Centrist
The American Heart Association is raising awareness that cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome (CKM Syndrome) can affect major organs in the body, including the brain, heart, liver and kidney. An analysis of 10,000 people found that 90% of people over age 20 met the criteria for developing CKM.
According to study lead Dr Rahul Aggarwal, “young adults, those younger than 45, are not as healthy as we thought they were.”
Dr Aggarwal studied 10,000 respondents in a long-running National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. He told the Journal of the American Medical Association that CKM risk in the respondents was “higher than we anticipated for younger adults.”
According to the Harvard Medical School cardiology fellow, almost 50% of the nutrition survey’s participants were at stage 2 of CKM. This means that they were at moderate risk because they had either high blood sugar, hypertension, high cholesterol or chronic kidney disease.
Other young adults were at increased risk of developing heart disease because of being obese or overweight, having excess belly fat and fat around their organs.
The researchers found that 15% of survey participants had advanced disease, a number that remained fairly constant between 2011 and 2020.
