A 29-year-old marketing professional visited the OPD after experiencing occasional fatigue and mild breathlessness during workouts. He had no major health complaints, did not smoke and believed heart disease was something people worried about only later in life . However, a routine health check-up revealed alarmingly high LDL (“bad”) cholesterol levels. Further questioning uncovered a strong family history of early heart disease — his father had suffered a heart attack at 48. The early stages of arterial damage had already begun silently over the years. Cases like these are becoming increasingly common in urban India, where unhealthy diets, long working hours, chronic stress, poor sleep, and lack of physical activity are accelerating metabolic disorders at a much younger age. Yet cholesterol testing continues to be viewed as something only middle-aged adults need to think about. The myth of ‘middle-aged cholesterol’ For decades, cholesterol testing has largely been associated with people above 40.…