Study: Traffic Jam Can Trigger Heart Attack

The bad side of traffic jam, it can stimulate the heart attack!

Living in a big city makes you cannot avoid a traffic jam, you need to familiarize yourself with tons of patient while you are riding your car. This traffic not only makes us tired, stressed, emotional, and come late to the office, but also adversely affect your health. Research shows that traffic jam can increase the risk of heart attack. How did it happen?

Traffic jams increase the risk of heart attack

Research shows that some people who have had a heart attack revealed that they were one day stuck in traffic. This finding was reported by researchers at the 49th Annual Conference of the American Heart Association at the symposium of the Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention.

Annete Peters, Ph.D., lead author of the study from the Institute of Epidemiology, Germany, stated that the risk of healthy people will increase and lead into heart attack due to being stuck in traffic, whether driving alone or taking public transportation, it could be 3 or 2 times higher than groups of people who are already at high risk of the disease (both due to age, lifestyle, and a history of other heart-related diseases).

The results showed that about eight percent of heart attacks in healthy groups of people were affected by the traffic jams experienced before the attack appeared. In addition, this study also shows that women have a risk of heart attack due to traffic jam five times higher than men. However, researchers have not been so sure what caused it.

It should be noted that this study does not state that traffic jam is the main cause of a heart attack. Traffic jam is only one of many other factors that can increase your risk.

Why?

Relationship Of High Blood Pressure And Heart Attack

To find out the exact cause of the appearance of a heart attack after being caught in a traffic jam, Peters and his colleagues conducted a follow-up test and collaborated with researchers from the University of Rochester, New York.

There were around 120 healthy volunteers included in this study. The volunteers were then equipped with an electrocardiogram and other devices capable of measuring exposure to air pollution and also noise on the streets.

The participants were then asked to carry out their daily routine as usual. Unfortunately, the results of the study are not yet available so that the exact cause cannot be known.

However, Peters suspects that stress, road noise, and vehicle exhaust emissions are factors that contribute to the increased risk of heart attack due to the traffic jam.

When stuck, this pollution exposure automatically becomes more inhaled by the body. Not only that, because stress also does have a real negative impact on the body as a whole.

Negative effects of pollution

Air pollution contains various kinds of harmful compounds for the body. Quoted from the page of the American Heart Association, Dr. Luepker, an epidemiologist, states that the short-term effects of air pollution tend to attack people who are elderly and already have heart disease.

For example, people with atherosclerosis are at high risk of being directly affected by pollution. When pollutants enter the body and irritate the lungs and blood vessels around the heart, this can trigger a heart attack.

Pollution also has an inflammatory effect on the heart which causes chronic cardiovascular problems. That way, a heart attack can easily appear suddenly.

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