City life increases heart disease risk
Living in built up areas could increase your risk of heart disease compared to people living in the country.
An investigation published in the Journal of Internal Medicine found that living in the city centre made calcification of coronary arteries almost more than twice as likely when compared to life in the suburbs or rural areas.
Coronary artery calcification (CAC) can lead to heart disease and stroke.
Of the 1,225 men and women aged 50-60 followed, 20 per cent lived in major cities and 43 per cent of the total had CAC despite showing no sights of heart disease.
It found that people living in cities were 80 per cent more likely to develop CAC than others in the study.
"The place where a person lives is often used as a surrogate for exposure to air pollution in research. In this study we found that, even after adjusting for demographic and clinical variables, where people lived was independently associated with CAC and that CAC levels were highest in people living in city centres," said Dr Jess Lambrechtsen from the Department of Cardiology at Svendborg Hospital, Denmark, the lead study author.
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