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, US 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, 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 with 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 [one to two 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 10,000 people, each individual session of physical or sexual activity per week can be associated with an increase of one to two 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.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of