SEX
KILLS!
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Sudden bursts of moderate to intense physical
activity -- such as jogging or having sex -- significantly increase
the risk of having a heart attack, especially in
people who do not get regular exercise, U.S. researchers said on
Tuesday.
Doctors have long known that physical activity can cause serious
heart problems, but the new study helps to quantify that risk, Dr.
Issa Dahabreh of Tufts Medical Center in Boston, whose study
appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The team analyzed data from 14 studies looking at the link
between exercise, sex and the risk of heart attacks or
sudden cardiac death -- a lethal heart
rhythm that causes the heart to stop circulating blood.
They found people are 3.5 times more likely to get a heart
attack or have sudden cardiac death when they are exercising
compared to when they are not.
And they are 2.7 times more likely to get a heart attack when
they are having sex or immediately afterward compared with when
they are not. (These findings do not apply to sudden cardiac death
because there were no studies looking at the link between sex and
cardiac death.)
Jessica Paulus, another Tufts researcher who worked on the
study, said the risk is fairly high as such studies go. But the
period of increased risk is brief.
"These elevated risks are only for a short period of time (1 to
2 hours) during and after the physical or sexual activity," Paulus
said in a telephone interview.
Because of that, the risk to individuals over the course of a
year is still quite small, she said.
"If you take 1,000 people, each individual session of physical
or sexual activity per week can be associated with an increase of 1
to 2 cases of heart attack or sudden cardiac death per year,"
Paulus said.
She said it is important to balance the findings with other
studies showing that regular physical activity reduces the risk of
heart attacks and sudden cardiac death by 30 percent.
"What we really don't want to do is for the public to walk away
from this and think exercise is bad," she said.
What it does mean is that people who do not exercise regularly
need to start any exercise program slowly, gradually increasing the
intensity of the workout over time.