Everything, post-punk songsmith Joe Jackson once ironically warbled, gives you cancer.
But that’s not all. As a pair of studies from American Medical Association journals reveal, otherwise healthy activities like exercise, sex and medical check-ups all carry a minimal cardiac risk.
Exercise and sex
The heart-boosting benefits of regular exercise are long-established. Perhaps for this reason, tales of people dying during or after exercise and sex have only rarely been the preserve of medical journals. Accordingly, it was unknown whether such work-outs can actually trigger heart attacks.
Researchers from American universities Tufts and Harvard pulled together 14 clinical studies from the last 20 years that investigated this question. When the data was pooled they found that “episodic physical activity” put people at 3.5 times the risk of suffering a heart attack and “episodic sexual activity” increased the risk 2.7 times.
Presented like that, the results might strongly favour a lifestyle of complete idleness and abstinence. It is worth remembering that the likelihood of suffering a heart attack at any moment in life is so small that more than trebling this risk is scant cause for concern.
To illustrate this, the researchers performed some supplementary analysis and estimated that if the study participants had all performed an extra hour of physical activity this would have only resulted in a total of 2 or 3 extra heart attacks for every 10,000 years of participant data.
Furthermore, the researchers found that the heart attack risk was reduced for people who enjoyed regular physical exercise: all the more reason, then, not to delay the next trip to the gym (or the bedroom).
Medical check-ups and “white coat hypertension”
High blood pressure, or hypertension, is a much more troubling risk factor for heart attacks and other severe cardiac events.
Yet many people diagnosed with this condition may only have high blood pressure during check-ups with their doctor. This phenomenon is called “white coat hypertension” and its prevalence is demonstrated in a large study by a team of Spanish clinicians.
Over 8,000 patients with hypertension that had proved resistant to treatment had their blood pressure checked at regular intervals under normal living and working conditions. This technique – ambulatory blood pressure monitoring - revealed that 37 per cent of subjects were, in fact, suffering from white coat hypertension.
As drug therapy is not recommended for such people, this study implies that many who currently take medication to reduce high blood pressure do so unnecessarily. Antihypertensive drugs, like all pharmaceutical products, carry their own side effects and risks of adverse reactions.
Although the cardiovascular danger associated with white coat hypertension is much less than for those with genuine high blood pressure, “those who [have] white coat hypertension are not risk free,” according to the study’s lead author, Dr Alejandro de la Sierra.
Nonetheless, the risk here is more one of developing genuine, sustained hypertension. In which case, white coat hypertensives are at risk of developing a risk factor for severe cardiac events.
No need to start singing about how everything gives you heart attacks just yet.
Picture by Chuck Patch (via Flickr)
Dahabreh, I., & Paulus, J. (2011). Association of Episodic Physical and Sexual Activity With Triggering of Acute Cardiac Events: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 305 (12), 1225-1233 DOI: 10.1001/jama.2011.336
de la Sierra, A., Segura, J., Banegas, J., Gorostidi, M., de la Cruz, J., Armario, P., Oliveras, A., & Ruilope, L. (2011). Clinical Features of 8295 Patients With Resistant Hypertension Classified on the Basis of Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring Hypertension DOI: 10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.110.168948
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