Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 19, 1993 TAG: 9303190145
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: ANAHEIM, CALIF. LENGTH: Medium
WHAT NEXT! BIRTHDAYS, HEART ATTACKS LINKED
Doctors have uncovered what must be one of nature's crueler ironies: People are especially likely to suffer heart attacks on their birthdays.A study released Thursday shows that people - especially men - are about 20 percent more likely to suffer a heart attack on their birthday than on other days of the same week.
Just what folks should do about this is not clear, though. Certainly birthdays cannot be avoided, as much as people might like to. But overindulgence can be, and researchers suspect that might be the real culprit.
Looking at when heart attacks occur is a hot subject of research. Experts hope their work will help reveal the forces that trigger these attacks, so they can find new ways to stop them.
Anything that reduces the number of heart attacks has a major impact on public health, because heart attacks are the nation's biggest killer, taking 500,000 lives a year.
Dr. Alan Wilson of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., based his birthday findings on records of 118,955 heart attacks treated over five years at 90 New Jersey hospitals. He presented his data at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology.
The pattern was significantly different for men and women, Wilson said. Men's heart attack rates were 21 percent higher on their birthdays, but women's were only 9 percent higher.
"Emotional stress and overindulgence," such as drinking and smoking, might explain the birthday risk, he said. "The sex difference may give us clues about the trigger."
The study of what touches off heart attacks is one of the newest in cardiology. It began with the discovery by Dr. James Muller in 1985 that people face their highest risk of heart attack during the first hour or two of the morning.
"There is a lot of interesting information coming out on emotional stress. A birthday is a big event," said Muller, a physician at Deaconess Hospital in Boston.
Wilson also found that people are more likely to be seen for heart attacks on the day after holidays. Heart attacks were 16 percent more common than expected on the day after New Year's, 28 percent higher after Easter and 17 percent higher after the Fourth of July.
Several studies have found that heart attacks are also more common on Mondays and in winter.