Lovemaking can end in embarrassing death

FRANCE: The French call it la petite mort and now their scientists have shown that the moment of climax really can be deadly: a cardiac arrest is four times more likely to be fatal during sex.

Parisian doctors believe that wives - or mistresses - are too embarrassed to call for help, meaning that when a heart stops in the bedroom it is more dangerous than during other exertion.

Patients who collapsed during sex were less likely to receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and had longer delays in getting treatment, quite literally dying of embarrassment.

Cardiac arrest happens when the heart stops beating as a result of an irregular rhythm, and it is quickly fatal without treatment. Heart attack, in which blood flow to the heart is blocked, is a different condition but can set off a cardiac arrest.

Women, who are less likely to suffer a cardiac arrest, should be taught how to keep calm and rescue their partners, the researchers said.

Sex can trigger heart problems in the moment but, despite what soap operas would have us believe, collapsing during the act itself is uncommon.

Ardalan Sharifzadehgan and colleagues at the Georges-Pompidou European Hospital in Paris looked at 246 people who had suffered a cardiac arrest during exercise, almost all of them men.

Half the 17 men whose hearts stopped during sex died, compared with 12 per cent of those who had a cardiac arrest during sport, Sharifzadehgan told the European Society of Cardiology congress in Barcelona.

This seemed to be because less than half of those who had been having sex were given CPR, even though - by definition - there was someone on hand.

Four in five of those who had a cardiac arrest during sport received CPR and their blood stopped flowing for an average of two minutes, compared with five for those interrupted during sex.

‘‘If there is a witness . . . it’s better for you, you have a bystander to give you CPR - but sometimes we have a witness who doesn’t do anything,’’ Sharifzadehgan said.

‘‘They are shocked, they don’t know how to react. The husband is naked, they are naked, maybe they’re afraid to call the neighbours. There’s big, big embarrassment.’’

There was a serious argument for encouraging women to react quickly, he said. ‘‘The first thing to do is to call help in the building or from neighbours. Then [the woman] can give CPR and someone else can call the emergency services.’’

Jeremy Pearson, associate medical director of the British Heart Foundation, said the findings should not scare people off sex, which, like other forms of exercise, could be good for the heart.

He backed the call for better education in CPR. ‘‘We want everybody to do CPR - in whatever position they find themselves.’’ - The Times