Traffic Jams Help You Cruise Down The Road to an Early Heart Attack

by Tanya on  March 16, 2009 at 10:37 AM Heart Disease News
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Researchers have warned that finding yourself in the middle of heavy traffic helps you along the road to early heart attacks - the statistics substantiating this show that it can actually triple your risk of heart attack within one hour!

Researchers reported at the American Heart Association's 49th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention that people who have had a heart attack are likely to report having been in traffic shortly before their symptoms began.

In the German study of patients who had a heart attack, researchers found the patients to be more than three times as likely to have been in traffic within an hour of the onset of their heart attack.

The researchers also observed small but statistically significant increases in the chance that a heart attack occurred within six hours after exposure to traffic.

Time spent in any mode of transportation in traffic was associated with a 3.2 times higher risk than time spent away from this trigger. Females, elderly males, patients who were unemployed, and those with a history of angina were affected the most by traffic.

"Driving or riding in heavy traffic poses an additional risk of eliciting a heart attack in persons already at elevated risk," said Annette Peters, Ph.D., lead author of the study and head of the research unit at the Institute of Epidemiology, Helmholtz Zentrum Muchen, Germany.

"In this study, underlying vulnerable coronary artery disease increased the risk of having a heart attack after driving in traffic," the expert added.

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