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Show W arns Young Men of Big Cities Not to Overtax Hearts lunvare Too Murli Work, Food; Too Little Exercise Atlantic City, N. J. Warning Warn-ing to young professional and business men who live in large cities, work hard, exercise exer-cise little, eat too much and smoke too much appeared in the report of Drs. K. Earle Glendy, Samuel A. Levine j and Paul D. White of Boston nt the meeting here of the American Medical associa- ! tion. Heart disease before they are six- i ty years old is the likely fate of such young men. More than one out of every hun- ' dred cases of heart disease 1.6 per I cent occurs In patients under forty ! years of age, these physicians found. ' Young men are much more frequent victims than young women in the ratio of 24 to 1. Hoping to learn why so many young men are falling victims to what has generally been considered j a disease of old age, the Boston physicians investigated the inheritance inherit-ance and living habits of a group of 100 young heart patients and compared com-pared these with similar information informa-tion obtained from men and women of eighty, ninety and one-hundred years of age. Jews More Susceptible. Relatively far more of the older people were of British race stock, although the method of selection of this group for study and the time of immigration may have influenced this factor. Jewish people are more susceptible to heart and blood vessel disease, the study showed. The old men and women had longer-lived ancestors than the young heart disease dis-ease patients. These factors are beyond the control con-trol of the individual, but living conditions con-ditions and habits which he can control evidently also play an Important Im-portant part in causing development of heart diseases. Country life, for Instance, is not as hard on the heart as the stresses of city life. Nearly three-fourths of the men and women past eighty years old lived in the country or small towns, while nearly nine-tenths nine-tenths of the young heart patients lived in large cities. The older persons all claimed to have been moderate eaters and while, as the doctors pointed out they may have forgotten the hearty appetites of their youth their body build was generally lean as compared com-pared to the heavy build of the young heart patients. Smoking Plays Big Part. Over nine-tenths of the older people peo-ple exercised considerably till well past middle age. The young heart patients had many of them been strenuously athletic in their youth but only few continued to exercise regularly. A striking difference between the two groups was found in their use of tobacco, and this together with other evidence of the effect of tobacco, tobac-co, the Boston physicians believe, suggests that smoking plays an important im-portant part. A little over half the old group were smokers but only a few were heavy smokers. Over nine-tenths of the young group were smokers, more than half of them heavy smokers. The two groups were more alike in their use of alcohoL A surprising finding was that severe infectious disease, generally supposed to impose im-pose considerable strain on the heart, had occurred, with the exception ex-ception of diphtheria and pneumonia, pneumo-nia, more frequently in the older group than the young group. Even rheumatic fever, and tonsilitis occurred oc-curred less frequently in the younger young-er group. The younger group, however, how-ever, had more surgical operations than the older. Irregular and few hours of sleep and nervous sensitiveness and nervous nerv-ous strain were other conditions found much more frequently in the young group which may have contributed con-tributed to the early appearance of serious heart disease. |