When sex can cause heart attacks

When sex can cause heart attacks

(AP) CHICAGO -- Sex and exercise can trigger heart attacks in older people who don't get much of either, a new analysis finds. The risk is low, but it's a good reminder that slackers should change their exercise habits gradually, especially in middle age.


People who exercise regularly have a much smaller risk of having a heart attack immediately after sexual or physical activity, said lead author Dr. Issa Dahabreh of Tufts Medical Center in Boston.


"It would be really bad if someone thought our paper means people should not exercise," Dahabreh said. "If anything, it's the opposite."


The analysis, appearing in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association, combined results from 14 studies involving more than 6,000 patients.


The studies involved only people who'd had heart attacks or had died suddenly from a heart problem. The studies looked at what the people were doing during the hour or two before their heart attacks and compared that to the same people's activity on normal days with no major heart problems.


That study design is used to try to answer the question, "Why did the heart attack occur now?"


Physical activity and sex increased the risk of heart attack by a factor of about three, according to the analysis of the pooled results. Exercise increased the risk of sudden cardiac death by nearly five times. The researchers didn't find a triggering relationship between sex and sudden cardiac death, that is, a sudden death from a heart problem.


The risk for any one person is extremely low.


"If you were to follow 10,000 people for a year and if they all decided to increase their physical activity by an hour a week, you could expect to see two to three more heart attacks," Dahabreh said.


That risk is offset for most people by the benefits of exercise. The more frequently people exercise, in general, the less risk they have of exercise or sex triggering a heart attack.


Most of the patients in the studies were in their late 50s and early 60s, but the findings are a cautionary tale for people in any age group who are slowing down.


Exercise might even be considered cross-training for sex, said Mercedes Carnethon, a heart disease researcher at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, who wasn't involved in the research.


"Engaging in regular physical activity is a requirement for maintaining a long, safe, healthy sex life," Carnethon said.


"If this isn't more motivation for people to maintain some degree of physical activity, I'm not sure what is," Carnethon said. "Get out and walk. Do something."

Breast cancer risk rises with 2nd-hand smoke

Breast cancer risk in a new study in the British Medical Journal rose the more women smoked and the longer they did so, researchers found. (Francois Mori/Associated Press)

Breast cancer risk rises with 2nd-hand smoke

Women who are former or current smokers as well as those who have been exposed to decades of second-hand smoke face a higher risk of breast cancer after menopause, according to a new study.

Smokers and women who quit up to 20 years previously are more at risk of the disease compared to other postmenopausal women who have never smoked or have never been around second-hand smoke, researchers said in Wednesday's issue of the British Medical Journal.

Prof. Juhua Luo of the department of community medicine at West Virginia University and her co-authors looked for confirmed cases of invasive breast cancer among nearly 80,000 American women 50 to 79 years old who entered the study between 1993 and 1998.

Over an average followup of 10 years, 3,520 cases of breast cancer were found in the Women's Health Initiative study, which is funded by the U.S. National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Current smokers had 1.16 times the breast cancer risk compared to women who never smoked, the team found. Breast cancer risk was raised by 1.09 times among former smokers after menopause. Twenty years after butting out, the risk appeared drop off.

"We were able to see the risk elevated in women who smoked as few as five to 15 cigarettes per day; but the more women smoked and the longer women smoked, the higher the risks, and it's really pretty consistent," said study co-author Dr. Karen Margolis, senior clinical investigator with HealthPartners Research Foundation in Minneapolis.

 The link between increased risk of breast cancer and second-hand smoke was only found for extensive exposure — more than 10 years recalled during childhood, more than 20 years at home as an adult and more than a decade at work.

Since there was no clear trend for lower doses of second-hand smoke, the researchers cautioned the data is suggestive of a link that needs to be confirmed by other studies.

"Our findings highlight the need for interventions to prevent initiation of smoking, especially at an early age, and to encourage smoking cessation at all ages," the study authors concluded.

Until recently, most scientists agreed there wasn't enough consistent evidence to show whether active smoking can cause breast cancer, the researchers said.

The authors pointed to a 2009 review by a Canadian panel of experts who examined more than 100 population and toxicology studies. The reviewers concluded that young women in particular need to be aware of the breast cancer risk of second-hand smoke.

The latest findings support the idea that smoking increases breast cancer risk "in particular when the habit starts early in life," Paolo Boffetta from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York said in a journal editorial.

Boffetta also cautioned that the second-hand smoking evidence should be "considered suggestive of an association at best."

The researchers did not collect data on the intensity or frequency of second-hand smoke exposure, which they said may have hampered their ability to detect an effect from increasing doses.

More than 80 per cent of women in Western countries have been exposed to second-hand smoke at home or at work, according to a study cited by Luo's team.