Home is where the heart
attack is.
By Sara
Chodosh Updated: December 18, 2019
We romanticize the holiday
season so much that it’s easy to forget how stressful the whole thing can be. Many of us
travel, putting ourselves at the mercy of the TSA or highly trafficked
interstates. We have to pick out presents, often for people we don’t know well,
and then we have to spend money to buy them. We see family members whose
politics we disagree with. We endure office holiday parties. We eat oodles of fat and sugar.
All of this makes the
period between Christmas and New Year’s one of the most common times of the
year to have a heart attack (in predominantly Christian countries, anyway).
This is actually something
cardiologists have known for a while—several studies examining mortality around the holidays
have resoundingly found that your risk of dying, in general, is significantly
higher around that time. They've also specifically looked at heart attacks
and found the same thing. But dying of a heart attack is very different
from the risk of having a heart attack.
A recent study of overall mortality around the end
of the year suggested that understaffing at hospitals and failure to have
follow-up appointments during the festive season contributes to a patient's
increased risk of dying. Emergency rooms may be short on nurses, and senior
physicians who would otherwise be around to treat patients are probably taking
time to be with their families. These very human, very reasonable aspects of
medicine mean that the holidays can be deadly. Even if the same number of
people had heart attacks on Christmas as did on any other random day of the
year, you might see more deaths.
So researchers from Sweden
decided to take a closer look. They published the resulting paper in the British Medical
Journal’s 2018 Christmas issue. Luckily, they had some great data to work
with.
Anyone who got admitted to
a Swedish hospital with symptoms resembling an acute heart problem between 1998
and 2013 was automatically enrolled in the SWEDEHEART study. Researchers
gathered detailed data about them: What time did their symptoms start? What was
the eventual diagnosis? That way, cardiologists could figure out whether more
people are having heart attacks around Christmas or if heart attacks are more
deadly at that time of year. These cardiologists decided to also look at other
holidays and events of national import. Christmas and New Year’s are the main
festivities, but there’s also Easter, FIFA World Cup, and Sweden's Midsummer
holiday.
When the researchers
compared all of these events, Christmas Eve turned out to be the most common
time for a heart attack. A person’s risk on that night is 37 percent higher
than normal, with the absolute peak at 10 p.m. The whole week between Christmas
Eve and New Year’s has an elevated risk of heart attack, and New Year’s Day
itself has an overall raised risk of 20 percent. And though this shouldn’t come
as a surprise, all of these risks were worse for people with factors that
predisposed them to heart attacks in the first place, like being overweight or
having high blood pressure.
The researchers didn't find
any associated risks with holidays like Easter or Midsummer, or with Swedish
athletic teams playing in tournaments. Previous studies had found that sporting
events were stressful enough to bring about an increased risk, so the authors
were surprised—but noted it's possible that prior studies simply looked at
countries where more people were heavily invested in the outcome of the World
Cup. That highlights one important caveat of the study: researchers only looked
at patients in Sweden, so results may vary around the world. Maybe that
Christmas Eve specificity doesn't apply elsewhere. But similar research does
support the general notion that major holidays are a veritable death trap:
Countries with large Muslim populations, for example, see a similar effect around Eid
Al-Fitr, an important holiday marking the end of Ramadan's month of
fasting.
The upshot is this: Stress triggers heart attacks and it seems the
most common time of year for that stress to manifest is the holiday
season—whatever that means to you and yours. If Christmas is a part of your
life, don’t fool yourself with tinsel and Santa hats and carols about
cheer—this is a tough few weeks. People who have risk factors for heart
problems should try to take it easy. Get someone else to shovel snow, avoid travel on peak
days, and try to keep your eating habits as close to normal as possible (within
reason—cookies are delicious). If you must expose yourself to holiday
stressors, be aware of the signs of an oncoming heart attack—and
remember that they’re different for men and women. It couldn’t hurt to ask your
fellow celebrants to read up on when and how they should perform CPR.
And if heart trouble—or any
health trouble, for that matter—puts you in the ER, remember to stay vigilant about your follow-up care after you’re
released. Don’t become a statistic by slipping through the cracks
this holiday season.
No comments:
Post a Comment