Are sports fans more likely to have heart issues?
As a boy in Chile, Miguel Maturana was taken to soccer games on the shoulders of his father, who joined the sea of people in the stadium cheering wildly.
“I was like, ‘Dad what’s going on?’” Maturana remembered. “He would be yelling during the entire game and be getting very passionate about it.”
It was clear to Maturana, from an early age, that many people in his native country loved the sport. But as he got older, he noticed another trend: There were spectators in the stadium experiencing cardiovascular events. Fans would have chest pain, transient increases in blood pressure, and arrhythmias. On rarer occasions, they would even have heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths.
But what was the reason for this? After all, wasn’t heartbreak for sports fans meant to be figurative, not literal? And if this was a trend in Chile, was it happening in other places too?
Today, Maturana is a Memphisbased doctor and the chief cardiology fellow at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Medicine, and he set out to address questions like those. Working with a team of researchers from UTHSC and Christian Brothers High School, he scoured PubMed, the biomedical literature database managed by the National Library of Medicine, and analyzed studies from the last 50 years that showed connections between sports, emotions, and cardiovascular outcomes.
Published in ScienceDirect, his research was titled “Are Die-Hard Football or Other Sports Fans at Risk of Cardiovascular Events?”
Here’s what Maturana and his team found.
Powerful emotions
Before we continue, I should say this: Don’t panic.
Being passionate about your favorite team doesn’t mean you’re going to drop dead from a heart attack the next time it plays. There’s a chance your preferred sport isn’t among those whose fans appear to be at increased risk of cardiovascular events. And even if it is, there’s no reason you can’t continue to support your team, celebrating its victories and mourning its losses. But more on that later.
According to Maturana’s analysis, the four sports that have the most connections to cardiovascular events are soccer, hockey, rugby, and cricket. And the most common events experienced were transient blood pressure increases, irregular heartbeats, chest pain, heart attacks, and sudden cardiac deaths.
These incidents also tended to occur at particular times. Generally, they would occur near or at the end of games, and often, they would happen during semifinals or championship games, when the stakes were highest.
“That’s one of the things they found: most of these events and emotions related to the sport, and the number emergency room visits with these patients, were closely or more strongly associated to the finals of the competition,” Maturana explained. “When the event was in the most important part of the competition, that’s when they saw most of the patients going to the emergency room.”
This makes sense. In things like finals and tournaments, it’s a do-or-die scenario, and tensions are high. I’m sure fellow Memphis Grizzlies fans can recall the team’s seven-game playoff series against the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2014, which featured four straight overtime games. I felt like I was going to have a heart attack that series, and I was only 18.
At times like these, passionate fans can be overwhelmed with emotion, and this can contribute to cardiovascular events. But hold on. Why is that?
“Why do emotions cause cardiovascular problems?” Maturana said. “Why don’t emotions cause good things?”
Nervous? Let’s talk about your nervous systems
Emotions can, of course, cause good things too, as Maturana knows. But that’s not always the case in sports.
Everyone has a sympathetic nervous system and a parasympathetic nervous system.
Think of the sympathetic nervous system as the “fight or flight” system; it’s best known for its role in responding to dangerous or stressful situations.
The parasympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, tends to be activated when resting or sleeping. Think of it as the “rest and digest system.”