India's heart attacks come a decade early. Here's what to screen.

If you're an Indian adult, the global health playbook is calibrated for someone else's body. Cardiovascular disease tends to strike Indians roughly a decade earlier and hit harder, and abnormal lipids affect a striking share of the population.

The problem is that the cholesterol panel most of us get — total, LDL, HDL — was never designed to catch the way that risk actually shows up here. Two markers tell a far truer story, and almost no routine checkup includes them.

The first is ApoB. Where LDL estimates the cholesterol carried in particles, ApoB counts the particles themselves — the actual things that lodge in your artery walls. For many people, especially with Indian metabolic patterns, ApoB reveals risk that LDL alone calls 'fine'.

The second is Lipoprotein(a) — Lp(a). It's largely inherited, you're born with your level, and it's a powerful, independent driver of early heart disease. You check it once in your life. Knowing can change the entire decade ahead.

Add a high-sensitivity CRP for vascular inflammation and, where appropriate, a low-dose CT calcium score, and you move from guessing to seeing. None of this is exotic. It's just not what the standard panel orders.

And then there's the half nobody screens: stress. Chronic stress is not a soft factor in heart disease — it's a measurable one, raising blood pressure and inflammation. Screen the mind alongside the heart, and you finally see the whole risk.