Super Bowl may trigger heart attacks
This Sunday's Super Bowl could be a real heartbreaker for some fans of the losing team.
New research shows that emotional stress, the fans feel after a loss can lead to fatal heart attacks, especially for people who already have heart disease. Stress causes the "fight or flight reaction, which causes a strong upticks in heart rate and blood pressure, which can strain the heart.
For people with heart disease - or those who are at risk due to factors such as obesity, smoking and diabetes - such pressure can be damaging, if not fatal.
In the study, which was published Monday in the journal Clinical Cardiology, researchers looked at death records in Los Angeles for two weeks after the 1980 and 1984 Super Bowls, both teams were flying from Los Angeles. (Match days were included.) So, as a control, the researchers examined the same data in the corresponding period in the middle.
In 1980, when the return of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the fourth quarter to beat the LA Rams down, deaths from cardiac causes increased by 15% among men and 27% of women in the next two weeks, during the same period of 1981 to 1983.
Super Bowl 1984 was another story. The Los Angeles Raiders handily beat the Washington Redskins, unlike four years ago, the cardiac death rate did not increase after the match. In fact, the mortality rate for women and seniors has declined slightly.
"Fans will develop the emotional connection to their team ... and when their team loses, and emotional stress," said the study's lead author, Robert A. Kloner, MD, professor of cardiology at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, Los Angeles. "There is a connection of heart and brain, and it is important that people are aware."
The apparent relationship between the Super Bowl loss and death of cardiac origin is plausible, but largely speculative.
Kloner and colleagues studied data only from death certificates, not individuals, and can not be sure that people who have succumbed to a heart attack after the 1980 game the Rams fans were not even looked at the party.
David Frid, MD, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, who has not participated in the survey agree that "emotional triggers" can trigger heart attacks and other cardiac events. But he is not convinced that the pain caused by the loss hometown was responsible for the increased deaths.
"Was it because the Rams have lost?" Request Frid. "Or was the emotional rollercoaster of the game itself? What to do with the emotion of the event?