Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Holiday Season Brings Presents, Colorful Lights And A Sharp Spike In Heart Attacks
Christmas may be the peak time for heart attacks — at least in Sweden. Swedish researchers studied 283,014 heart attacks between 1998 and 2013 that were documented in a registry that included the date and time when symptoms started. They found that compared with days in the two weeks before and after Christmas, the risk of heart attack was 15 percent higher on Christmas Day and 37 percent higher on Christmas Eve. (Bakalar, 12/12)
On Dec. 24, the risk of a heart attack is 37% higher than normal, the researchers found. On Christmas itself, the increase in risk dips to 29%. Even on Boxing Day, it’s still 21% above normal levels. 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% 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. (Kaplan, 12/13)
In other heart health news —
Women with cardiac emergencies are less likely than men to receive proper treatment when the ambulance arrives, a new study reports. The analysis, in Women’s Health Issues, used four years of data from a federal government database to compile information on out-of-hospital emergencies involving people 40 and older with chest pain or cardiac arrest. Almost 2.4 million people, 1.2 million of them women, were included. (Bakalar, 12/13)
The US Food and Drug Administration issued a warning letter to the Chinese maker of an ingredient in popular heart drugs and said it continues to test the ingredient for cancer-causing chemicals. The letter, sent in late November, details manufacturing violations at the facility of Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., pointing out cross-contamination from one line to another, control issues and impurity control problems. (Christensen, 12/12)
And a doctor makes an argument that the gut is as important as the heart —
Medical researchers increasingly say that intestinal health is more important than we have previously believed. The dense and delicate nerve networks that ensheathe the bowels and the long arm of the immune system that patrols the gut wall suggest that the intestines not only digest food, but may regulate mood, emotion, and play a central role in immunologic response to disease. (Jangi, 12/12)
