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South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan 

As if a crippling medical manpower crunch - with just one doctor currently available for every 10,000 Indians - wasn't bad enough, India is also poised to hold a whopping 60% of the world's heart disease patients by 2010, according to a recent study by the British journal The Lancet.

The groundbreaking study, conducted by a team of researchers led by Dr Denis Xavier of St John's National Academy of Health Sciences in Bangalore, studied 21,000 heart attack patients admitted to 89 hospitals in 50 cities across the country. It found that while the cardiac risk factors in India - excessive tobacco consumption, high lipid levels in the blood due to fat-rich diets and hypertension - weren't dissimilar to those in other nations, what disadvantaged Indians further was the time it took for them to access medical help. . . .

India is also home to 12% of the world's smokers and will witness 930,000 deaths in 2010, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study estimates that India has about 120 million smokers who will contribute to deaths mainly from tuberculosis, heart disease and cancer.

Oncologist Dr Swati Chopra stresses that smoking exacerbates the risk of heart attack as elevated nicotine levels spike the body's bad cholesterol or LDL making the blood stickier and the arteries harder. "This enhances the blood's chances to clot more readily. Sticky blood flowing through hardened arteries can lead to the formation of a clot and block an artery. A blocked artery in the brain," informs the expert, "can trigger a brain stroke which may lead to paralysis or even death."

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