An ekincare report timed to World Heart Day 2026 found that 58.5% of Indian employees under 35 had at least one flagged cardiovascular risk marker in year-to-date data, based on health check-ups of 200,000 employees across the country.

The report’s own framing is worth sitting with: a decline from 70.9% in 2023 to 58.5% in 2026 could reflect genuinely improving health, but the report itself cautions that the safer reading is simply that risk has not increased, not that underlying health has clearly gotten better.

That caution matters because flagged-risk percentages depend heavily on who gets screened and how consistently, so a change in the screened population, more health-conscious employees opting in, for instance, could shift the numbers without reflecting a true population-wide health trend.

Still, that close to six in ten young employees carry at least one flagged marker, even after a decline, points to a workforce facing cardiovascular risk well before the ages typically associated with heart disease, a pattern increasingly documented in urban, sedentary working populations.

For employers and policymakers, the more actionable takeaway is less the exact percentage and more the case it builds for embedding preventive screening into routine workplace health programmes, since risk markers like these are identifiable, and often addressable, long before symptoms appear.

ekincare’s broader research also found that over 33% of Indians show early warning signs of chronic disease.

Many of these individuals appear healthy but carry markers linked to heart disease, obesity or diabetes.

Workplace health screening programmes have become more common among Indian employers in recent years.

Cardiovascular risk markers can often be identified before symptoms appear, through routine blood pressure, glucose and lipid testing.

Lifestyle factors such as diet, physical activity and stress are commonly cited contributors to cardiovascular risk in working-age populations.

World Heart Day is marked annually to raise awareness about cardiovascular disease prevention.

Heart health checkup (representative image), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0