Monzur Morshed is a cardiologist. Kaysan Morshed is a medical student.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I cared for a patient in the intensive care unit whose condition was critical. When I asked how he was feeling, he said, “Doctor, I am not afraid. My family is praying for me, and I believe God will give me strength.” Despite receiving the best medical interventions available, it was clear that his faith, cultural practices, and the support of his family played an undeniable …
Not long ago, a 36-year-old man came to the emergency room with crushing chest pain. He had no significant medical history, exercised occasionally, and thought heart disease was something he would only need to worry about decades from now. To his disbelief, he was having a heart attack.
Stories like his are no longer rare. Cardiologists and emergency physicians are increasingly seeing patients in their thirties and forties presenting with acute …
As a cardiologist in New York City who treats a sizable Bangladeshi‑American community, I have witnessed otherwise healthy individuals exhibit concerning cardiovascular events, frequently in the absence of conventional risk markers. What unites them? Severe, protracted psychological stress brought on by prejudice, family court disputes, immigration problems, or financial instability.
The mechanisms of prolonged stress
Prolonged stress raises cortisol, adrenaline, and inflammatory cytokines via activating the sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamic‑pituitary‑adrenal (HPA) …
Although cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the world’s largest cause of mortality, its burden varies by ethnicity. People from South Asia, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India, and Pakistan, are among the groups most at risk for developing coronary artery disease too soon. However, this population frequently receives standard risk assessments in clinical practice across the U.S. that do not take ethnic-specific risk factors into consideration, which results in underdiagnosis and …
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