Yale Climate Connections: Summer heat could be hurting your heart without you knowing it

Many forms of heart disease are linked to chronic inflammation, and scientists are probing whether global warming has worsened this condition for people around the world, even among younger adults in northern Europe where extreme heat is much less common than in India.

Unlike acute inflammation, the immune system’s tool to fight infection or heal an injury, chronic inflammation is a prolonged immune response that can damage healthy tissues over time. Chronic inflammation has been linked to conditions ranging from arthritis to heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and other major illnesses.

“People often think heat is only dangerous when it causes heat stroke or during a heat wave, but that is probably too narrow,” said environmental epidemiologist Daniel Riggs, who is an assistant professor in the division of environmental medicine and the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute at the University of Louisville. 

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