Winter Holidays are Peak Time for Heart Attacks
As winter continues and the holidays wrap up, it is imperative to be aware of the warning signs of a heart attack. Wintertime is the peak season for heart attack deaths. Whether it is cold weather or holiday and new year stress, it is a proven statistic that should not be taken likely. Be sure to check in on aging loved ones and elderly neighbors throughout the winter months. To learn more about how we help seniors and families every day in the St. Louis Park MN areas, visit us at http://angelcaremn.com.
Winter holidays are peak time for heart attacks
It’s the grimmest of holiday statistics: Heart-attack deaths peak on three days of the year, and one of them is Christmas. The other two are the day after Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Talk about your lump of coal.
And it gets worse. The holiday peak is just part of a larger, well-established pattern: More people die of heart attacks in winter than at any other time of year. In other words: It’s truly the season to know your risks — and reduce them, if you can. But first, it may help to ponder why these days are so deadly.
The seasonal link
In the USA, cardiac deaths peak in December and January, says Robert Kloner, a cardiologist at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. In Australia, he says, they peak in July — winter there.
So there’s something about winter. But what?
“Nobody knows,” says David Phillips, a sociologist at the University of California-San Diego who studies death patterns. Flu and pneumonia, which are tough on people with heart disease, clearly play roles in the high rate of all natural deaths in the winter, he says.
Shorter, darker days might matter, too, says Kloner, who has studied the winter link.
But he is convinced that one big factor is cold itself — though the heart death spike shows up even in warmer states. “It’s still colder in the winter,” he says. “Even in Los Angeles, (in early December) the temperatures in the morning were in the 30s.”
Cold alone, he says, can make blood vessels constrict, blood pressure rise and the heart work harder. It also might trigger changes in the blood that produce clotting and inflammation.
Just walking outside and taking an icy breath can “create a crisis,” says American Heart Association spokeswoman Tracy Stevens, a cardiologist at Saint Luke’s Health System in Kansas City, Mo. “That sudden exposure can cause constriction of the coronary arteries or lung constriction, which creates shortness of breath and puts a strain on the heart.”
But the answer isn’t staying on your couch. Stevens suspects that the sedentary lives many people lead in winter contribute to the risk. “Many of us are just like bears hibernating,” she says.
And what about snow shoveling? In many areas, it might be a factor. One recent study found that 7% of winter heart-attack victims in one Canadian hospital had been shoveling snow.
Stevens says the father of one of her patients died just that way, during a snowstorm last year: “The gentleman went out to shovel and get the cars ready, despite his wife giving him warning,” she says. “She found him dead in the car, reaching for the glove compartment, where his nitroglycerin was.”
