Although no one knew the reasons behind this, it became such common knowledge among doctors that it even found its way into a well-known medical illustration from decades ago, showing a businessman walking into a gusty snowstorm from a cozy restaurant, a smoldering cigarette at his feet, clutching his chest in pain.
Now, Moman Mohammad from Lund University, Sweden, and his colleagues have presented the results from a major study of all cardiovascular patients who came to Swedish cardiology units between 1998 and 2013. All told, 280,000 people were included in the assessment.
The researchers collected weather data on temperature, wind, precipitation, air pressure, and sunshine, for the same period and checked whether there were actually connections between the weather and heart health.
And there was.
More heart attacks in bad weather
In general, the risk of ending up in a cardiology department with a myocardial infarction, which is the medical name for a heart attack, was slightly higher in bad weather. In this case the researchers defined bad weather as when the temperature or air pressure dropped, when the wind strength increased, or the amount of sunshine decreased.The strongest connection was linked to temperatures. The risk of a heart attack increased markedly when the minimum temperature fell below freezing. This applied to many different subgroups of patients and for different regions.
However, there were also signs that people could adapt to weather conditions.
The results indicated that people in northern Sweden coped with cold days better than those who live further south. In the northernmost regions, there was no correlation between cold and heart attack, the researchers wrote.
But Swedish people in the north were not completely immune to bad weather. They also had more heart problems on days where there was more snow and wind.
http://sciencenordic.com/more-people-suffer-heart-attacks-bad-weather-study
No comments:
Post a Comment