Haider Warraich: ‘We do everything in our modern lifestyle to hurt the heart’
Haider Warraich is a cardiologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. His medical training began in his native Pakistan, and this autumn he will join the faculty of Brigham and Women's hospital at Harvard Medical School and the VA Boston (Department of Veterans Affairs medical facilities). In his book State of the Heart, he looks at the history, science and future of cardiac disease, and argues that it has become an overlooked condition.
People are more likely to survive a heart attack today, but heart disease is still the biggest killer worldwide. Why is that?
In the last few decades we've changed a heart attack from an almost certainly fatal diagnosis to one the vast majority of patients can recover from. However, those advances mean people live long enough that they develop other conditions, including heart failure, which is a chronic condition in which the heart is unable to get blood to the entire body.