Christmas: Peak time for heart attacks, study shows
If you think of the night before Christmas as a time for hot cocoa, cozy fires and Bing Crosby albums, a new discovery by Swedish researchers may well break your heart:
The risk of suffering a heart attack spikes on Christmas Eve.
That finding is based on a comprehensive database of hospital statistics that includes 283,014 cases of heart attacks over a period of 16 years. It was published this week in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal).
The study would appear to put Christmas Eve in the same category as earthquakes, hurricanes, stock market crashes, wars and high-stakes World Cup soccer matches — after all of these events, scientists have documented that heart attacks are more likely to occur.
On Dec. 24, the risk of a heart attack is 37 percent higher than normal, the researchers found. On Christmas itself, the increase in risk dips to 29 percent.
For the sake of comparison, Mondays are known to be a time of increased heart attack risk. But in Sweden, the risk was only about 10 percent higher on the first day of the workweek.
The BMJ study isn’t the first to report an association between the holiday season and myocardial mayhem. A 2004 paper in the journal Circulation, for example, found that deaths due to all kinds of heart disease were higher in the U.S. on both Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Previous studies were based on information from death certificates, ambulance records and other kinds of health data. They weren’t able to say when, exactly, a patient’s heart attack began.
A team led by Moman Mohammad of Lund University’s Department of Cardiology set out to fill that gap.
To examine heart attack risk on Christmas Eve, the researchers tallied the number of heart attacks every Dec. 24 between 1998 and 2013, as well as for the two weeks before and after the holiday, to provide a baseline. On average, Swedes suffered 50.3 heart attacks per day during the baseline period, and 69.1 per day on Dec. 24.
Mohammad and his co-authors said they didn’t know why people would be more prone to heart attacks on Christmas Eve. Previous studies have linked “acute experiences of anger, anxiety, sadness, grief, and stress” with an elevated risk. Of these, the team wrote that stress is the emotion most likely to come into play on Christmas Eve.