How quickly does heart disease develop?
It develops often for decades before one develops symptoms, and so if we could really look inside the heart, we'd see that many people have coronary artery disease at a very young age, even in soldiers killed in battle in their late teen years or early twenties, often thickening of the coronary arteries has already occurred. But the symptomatic manifestations, when we really know we have it, often begins in the fifth, sixth, or seventh decade of life, and it's a major cause of death and disability in the older population in developed countries.
