Saturday December 24, 2022 | 5:30 p.m.
Due to the Holidays, travel and stress, fatal heart attacks are more frequent in December. In dialogue with The Harvard Gazette, Elliott Marshall Antman, a specialist in cardiovascular medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School, explained why and revealed the main warning signs.
“The increase almost certainly reflects a change in the individual’s usual state. In other words, if they are taking medication to control their cardiovascular disease, when the holidays arrive, their schedules may change, they may travel and they may not take the medication with the same reliability as before the holidays. Another possibility is that for many people the holidays are a period of stress. Travel is worrying, especially in the current situation, and respiratory diseases,” said the expert.
Along these lines, he maintained that “there may be social stresses that individuals experience, as the holidays approach, which can increase their blood pressure and heart rate, and those physiological responses can cause an imbalance in the blood supply to the heart muscle. . At that time, the heart muscle is subjected to great demand, so you can suffer a myocardial infarction. In the case of a specific person, various circumstances may occur. And we can’t say it’s the same set of circumstances from one person to another.”
Several years ago, researchers on the subject began to find an alarming trend in cardiac mortality as Christmas Eve, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve approached.
In 1994, the scientific journal Circulation was one of the pioneers in publishing an article in which they found, after studying the mortality rates of the last 30 years, that between the weeks of December 25 and January 7 in the United States United States, the number of heart attacks and death after it was abnormally high, compared to other months of the year. They called this finding the “holiday effect.”
A short time later, the same magazine presented a study from the University of Southern California, which confirmed what was found by his colleagues, but this time in the city of Los Angeles. In this case, the increase in deaths due to cardiac reasons during the festive season was greater and reached 33%. They also attributed this index to the “festive effect”.
The explanation for these facts was largely attributed to the fact that the psychological load at this special time of the year could lead to the appearance of emotional disorders in the most vulnerable people, generating strong stress, responsible for triggering cardiac decompensation.
Nor did they rule out that excesses in food, with high salt, fat and sugar contents, or the exaggerated consumption of alcoholic beverages typical of the Holidays could also have influenced these episodes.
The impact of stress
According to Antman, “stressful circumstances can produce three physiological reactions, which converge in the patient’s heart and in the arteries that supply blood to it. First, the heart rate can increase in response to stress.
Second, blood pressure can also increase in response to stress. And the third is that the release of substances such as adrenaline can cause the coronary arteries to narrow, further limiting the flow through those arteries, which are responsible for carrying blood to the heart muscle.
“Through one or more of these physiological responses -said the expert-, an individual could be at risk of suffering an alteration in the balance between the supply and demand of blood. But when we talk about stress, the physiological response to stress can be the result of good or bad emotions. The cardiovascular system will do the same.”
alarm signals
People who have a blood supply problem to the heart muscle often feel discomfort, often in the center of the chest, but it can radiate to the neck, jaw, shoulders, or arms. “Usually, it’s not at its most intense when it starts, but it builds up to a peak, and then when it goes away, it gradually goes away, rather than turning off a light,” he said.
Sometimes the discomfort is associated with a feeling of nausea, sweating, lightheadedness, palpitations. These are warning signs to a person that something might be wrong with the balance between blood supply and demand to their heart muscle. If this lasts for more than 10 minutes, the person should consider seeking medical attention.
“Many people who have a heart attack have discomfort that lasts 20 minutes or more. Going to the doctor is the best way to evaluate it. We do not want patients to experiment at home taking antacids and thinking that this will solve the problem; we want them to get to the health care system as soon as possible, and often that means calling 911″, she detailed.
The specialist also recognized that “although emergency services are full due to many other diseases that affect our communities, that is not a reason to avoid seeking medical attention for new or worsening cardiovascular symptoms.”
“It is possible to be suffering from a heart attack that presents with symptoms that affect only a part of the body away from the chest. And we must remember that some people, especially elderly patients or diabetics, when they have a heart attack, may have no discomfort, but feel fatigued or out of breath or sweat a lot more than usual. We must also be attentive to those symptoms ”, he concluded.
