HAVING HEART SURGERY IS MUCH BETTER

IN THE AFTERNOON, MAJOR NEW STUDY FINDS

Nobody wants to have open heart surgery. But if you do, you want to have it in that afternoon. That’s the conclusion of a major new study that found there is a significantly higher risk of damage for people having surgery in the morning. And it’s all because of the body clock, or circadian rhythms, which help keep us regulated through the day. It decides when we wake up, sleep and eat — and how ready we are to recover from major surgery.

The new study, published in the Lancet, found that there are almost 300 genes that link the body clock to heart damage. And it found that there is a link between a person’s body clock and how at risk they are of undergoing heart damage and major events like heart attacks after having heart surgery.

Study author Professor David Montaigne, University of

Lille, France, said: “Our study found that post-surgery heart damage is more common among people who have heart surgery in the morning, compared to the afternoon. Our findings suggest this is because part of the biological mechanism behind the damage is affected by a person’s circadian clock and the underlying genes that control it. As a result, moving heart surgery to the afternoon may help to reduce a person’s risk of heart damage after surgery.” Researchers looked at the medical records of 596 people who had heart valve replacement surgery including half who had surgery in the morning, half in the afternoon.

They checked for any major cardiac events such as a heart attack, heart failure or death from heart disease in this research which took place between January 2009 to December 2015. Those who had afternoon surgery had lower levels of heart tissue damage after surgery, compared with morning surgery patients, according to the researchers.