By Sara Waisanen
Kalamazoo Gazette
Copyright 2008 Kalamazoo Gazette
KALAMAZOO, Mich. — The Boston Globe Sports fanatics have long suspected it, but now German researchers have confirmed it just in time for Sunday’s Super Bowl: Intense athletic contests and equally passionate interest in those games can be hazardous to viewers’ health.
When Germany competed in pivotal soccer matches during the 2006 World Cup, the incidence of heart attacks and other acute cardiovascular conditions soared in Bavaria, scientists report in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Sunday’s Super Bowl game might evoke intense emotions in New York and New England, but Dr. Tim Fischell, director of cardiovascular research at Borgess Medical Center, doesn’t think Kalamazoo residents will experience nearly that much enthusiasm.
“If Detroit got into the Super Bowl probably everyone would have a heart attach,” Fischell quipped. But, come Sunday, “if we saw one or two, I’d be surprised.”
The German study found that people with previously diagnosed heart problems stood the greatest risk of having a heart attack during the World Cup: Cardiac episodes were four times higher for them when the German team was playing than on nongame days.
Overall, the German doctors found, the rate of heart attacks and other acute cardiac problems was 3.26 times higher for men and 1.82 times higher for women during World Cup matches.
The study confirms what specialists such as Rich Serino, the veteran chief of Boston’s emergency medical services division, have long known. Though EMS has no statistics on game-day heart attacks, Serino said his staff has repeatedly treated fans who suffer heart trouble during sporting events, usually while watching them on television.
“It depends on the game,” he said. “If it’s a blowout, less so, but if it’s the nail-biters, with a field goal or touchdown in the last few seconds,” then, he said, “it’s more stressful.”
A heightened sense of emotion can cause a big, big burst of adrenaline to release from the adrenal glands, according to Fischell. “That level of excitement isn’t easy on the heart,” the Kalamazoo cardiologist said.
The kicking, screaming and hollering on Super Bowl Sunday isn’t going to cause heart attacks in healthy 20-year-olds, but it could in people with heart disease, Fischell said.
“I think the risk is low,” he added.
So what’s a fan to do? First of all, heart patients “should regularly take their prescribed drug regimen,” said the paper’s senior author, Dr. Gerhard Steinbeck of Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat in Munich.
Do not drink too much alcohol or overeat junk food, he said. “Just be careful.” In case of symptoms such as chest pain or heart palpitations, do not delay seeking treatment, he said.
Might it help, perhaps, to keep reminding yourself that it’s just a game?
Steinbeck emphasized that his findings by no means translate into general advice to fans to skip big games altogether.
The overall risk of heart attack is still small, Steinbeck said. He and his colleagues calculate that on a normal day, the general risk for cardiac trouble severe enough to need medical treatment is 1 in 100,000 people. On the day of a 2006 World cup game with Germans playing, the risk rose to between 2 and 3 per 100,000.