Football, emotion and heart health

Football is the passion of the multitudes and is undoubtedly the most popular sport in the world. Millions of fans will be glued to the television this afternoon to see the momentous playoff match between the teams of Peru and Australia, to participate in the World Cup in Qatar. Today we will see how the emotion of football, especially if we reach a penalty shootout, would be negative for the heart.

There are several scientific studies that have tried to demonstrate that there is a direct relationship between watching a soccer game and the occurrence of a heart attack.

A dutch studiopublished in the “British Medical Journal” in December 2000 found that, compared to the year before and after, the number of heart attacks it increased by 51% on June 22, 1996, the day the Netherlands was eliminated from the European Soccer Cup.

A British study, in “British Medical Journal” in December 2002, showed that the number of heart attacks on June 30, 1998 (England lost to Argentina on penalties in France) increased by 25% in England. That increase corresponded to 55 more heart attacks than would normally have been expected on match day had the match not been played.

Another British studypublished in 2003, showed that the number of heart attacks it increased during the days when the Newcastle team were losing their championship games.

A brazilian study June 2013 also found that there was an increase in heart attacks in Brazil during the days when the national team played in four soccer world championships: 1998, 2002, 2006 and 2010.

But perhaps the most important study, so well planned from a scientific point of view, was the one published by German researchers in 2008. This, the only prospective study designed to study the relationship between soccer and the possibility of suffering a heart attackwas published on August 31, 2008 in the prestigious “New England Journal of Medicine”. In medicine, a prospective study (very valuable as a scientific method) is one that plans what it wants to study in advance and collects the data as it is produced.

“If a person suffers from heart disease, has a history of arrhythmias or hypertensive crisis, he should refrain from watching a football match.”

In that study, the researchers worked out the number of cases of heart attacks and episodes of cardiac arrhythmias (electrical disturbances of the heart) that were treated in the hospital system in Bavaria, Germany, from June 9 to July 9, 2006. That is, .

To find out if there was an increase in cases during the days of the World Cup, the researchers compared the number of heart attacks and arrhythmias on those days, with those produced before and after the championship and with those produced in 2003 and 2005, eliminating 2004 because that year there was a European Championship. The results are impressive: , or to put it in simpler words, .

The match in which Germany beat Argentina on penalties, the match that they lost to Italy and eliminated them from fighting for the title, and the match that beat Poland (their staunch rival), with a goal in the last minute, were games in which the highest number of heart attacks occurred. For its part, the day that Germany played Portugal for third place, there was no increase in the number of heart attacks, there was nothing to suffer from…

Overall, during the seven days that Germany played in the championship, there were 43 episodes per day of heart attacks or cardiac arrhythmiascompared to only 14 on control days.

As in almost all previous studies, , was more frequent in men and 47% had a previous history of heart disease. Very few women fell victim to a heart attack from watching football.

On the other hand, in a related studystrokes were not found to have increased on soccer game days, so for some reason the deleterious effects of a soccer game are more on the heart. That finding gives meaning to the popular terms “This game is heart-stopping” either “It’s a game not suitable for the faint of heart”.

Although some studies have been published that find no relationship between soccer and heart problems, including one Italian, one australian and a I study German which was done at the same time as the 2006 World Cup, the consensus is that there seems to be such a relationship.

, which occurs during the moments of emotion that are experienced during the game, especially during the penalty shootout. That’s a type of stress similar to what occurs during an earthquake or bad news flash, situations in which negative cardiac events have been documented.

Corollary

The advice given by the experts is that, especially during the definition by penalties, in which a lot is played and in which a lot of emotion is predicted.