A keen runner, Peter Taft was a familiar face at half marathons and marathons around his native Derbyshire. He was also a popular member of his local community and always had time for a friendly chat with his neighbours.
So, when Peter was late returning from his regular evening run in February 2023, his wife Sandra just thought he was busy catching up with a friend.
“I was just waiting for him to come home, I had the tea all ready and saw it was getting a bit late,” she says. “So I just went out to see if he was chatting, and there was an ambulance at the end of the street.
“I walked down and then realised it was him that they were trying to do CPR on.” A neighbour had called 999 after seeing Peter collapse outside their house and performed CPR on him until paramedics arrived.
Sadly, despite their best efforts, Peter passed away from a heart attack, aged just 58. “It was a horrid, horrid time,” recalls Sandra. “It was traumatic.”
Peter was a technical manager at a sustainable construction company and spent much of his time designing cycle kerbs for cities around the UK. He was fit and led a healthy lifestyle, so his death came totally out of the blue for his friends and family.
“It was a complete shock,” says Sandra. “He went out running two or three times a week. There were no warning signs. He was very fit.”
The coroner recorded Peter’s cause of death as acute left ventricular heart disease and ischaemic heart disease – heart damage caused by narrowed arteries – but he showed no symptoms of this before his death.
The couple, who had been together for five years but married for just 18 months, were looking to the future, and busy making plans to retire to Bexhill-on-Sea, where Peter had spent many happy holidays with his grandparents when he was a boy.
“We were both coming up to retirement age, and had started looking at places. Our next trip to Bexhill was booked, so I came anyway,” Sandra says.
“It was the first time I felt any sense of peace after he died.” Although 58 is a young age to have a heart attack, it is not unheard of and, just like in Peter’s case, heart attacks in midlife can often happen without warning.
“Heart attacks are still widely thought of as something that happens to older people, and until somebody our own age, or somebody we know, has one, it is remarkably easy to think of cardiovascular disease as something that happens to somebody else,” says Dr Chris Critoph, consultant cardiologist at Nuffield Health Bournemouth Hospital. “This may, in part, be because patients having a heart attack in midlife often have no symptoms beforehand.”
A heart attack is caused by cholesterol-rich plaque building up within the wall of one of the coronary arteries supplying blood to the heart. When the plaque ruptures, the body responds as if it is repairing an injury, with a blood clot forming on the surface. If the clot blocks the artery, it starves the heart of blood and oxygen.
Critoph explains: “Someone can be exercising normally on Monday, with no chest pain whatsoever, and have a major heart attack on Tuesday. The plaque was there, but it had not narrowed the artery sufficiently to restrict blood flow during exercise. It was the sudden formation of a clot that changed everything.”
Since the 1960s, the rate of heart disease in the UK has fallen, largely due to more people giving up smoking, improvements in cholesterol treatment and better medical care.
‘Someone can be exercising normally on Monday, with no chest pain whatsoever, and have a major heart attack on Tuesday,’ says Dr Chris Critoph (Photo: Dr Chris Critoph)However, last year, new figures from the British Heart Foundation highlighted an alarming rise in the rate and number of deaths in adults aged 20-64 from cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks and strokes.
The rate rose from 49 per 100,000 in 2019 to 55 deaths per 100,000 in 2023, which the BHF called “the first sustained increase in at least a generation”. Deaths in working-age adults rose by 18 per cent, from 18,693 in 2019, to 21,975 in 2023, averaging 420 a week.
According to Critoph, this is partly down to a sharp rise in two common health conditions. He says: “We have replaced one set of problems with others. Obesity is now incredibly common: in England, two thirds of adults are overweight, and around 30 per cent have obesity.
“Type 2 diabetes is also increasingly becoming a disease of younger people. There are now more than 160,000 people under 40 living with type 2 diabetes in England and Wales, and the numbers are rising faster than in older age groups.”
Making key lifestyle changes can reduce the risk of a heart attack, including quitting smoking, reducing alcohol intake, maintaining a healthy weight, exercising frequently, and eating a healthy, balanced diet, including limiting processed foods and saturated fat.
Cardiologists also recommend regular blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar checks, particularly if there is a family history of heart disease.
“You cannot feel your cholesterol. You usually cannot feel high blood pressure, and you can be developing diabetes for years without knowing about it,” explains Critoph. “Many people therefore do not get these things checked as they do not have symptoms.”
In England, people aged 40 to 74 who do not already have certain cardiovascular conditions should be offered an NHS Health Check every five years. This free midlife health evaluation is designed to spot early signs of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, and dementia.
“If you are eligible and have never had one, it is worth asking about it,” says Critoph. “By middle age, we should move beyond simply waiting for something to go wrong.”
Sandra, 61, has since moved to the Sussex coast and started volunteering with Touch Of Gentleness, offering therapeutic hand massages to people in dementia care settings and at a local blind centre, which she says has given her a renewed sense of purpose since Peter’s passing.
“For me,” she says, “my volunteering feels like my first step out of my grief.”
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