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Dirty Air Triggers More Heart Attacks Than Cocaine
LONDON -- Air pollution triggers more heart attacks than using cocaine and poses as high a risk of sparking a heart attack as alcohol, coffee and physical exertion, scientists said on Thursday.
Thick pollution can be seen as a man rides his bicycle across the main road running through Beijing's Tiananmen Square February 21, 2011. (Reuters/David Gray) Sex, anger, marijuana use and chest or respiratory infections and can also trigger heart attacks to different extents, the researchers said, but air pollution, particularly in heavy traffic, is the major culprit.
The findings, published in The Lancet journal, suggest population-wide factors like polluted air should be taken more seriously when looking at heart risks, and should be put into context beside higher but relatively rarer risks like drug use.
Tim Nawrot of Hasselt University in Belgium, who led the study, said he hoped his findings would also encourage doctors to think more often about population level risks.
"Physicians are always looking at individual patients -- and low risk factors might not look important at an individual level, but if they are prevalent in the population then they have a greater public health relevance," he said in a telephone interview.
The World Health Organization (WHO) describes air pollution as "a major environmental risk to health" and estimates that it causes around 2 million premature deaths worldwide every year.
Nawrot's team combined data from 36 separate studies and calculated the relative risk posed by a series of heart attack triggers and their population-attributable fraction (PAF) -- in other words the proportion of total heart attacks estimated to have been caused by each trigger.
The highest risk PAF was exposure to traffic, followed by physical exertion, alcohol, coffee, air pollution, and then things like anger, sex, cocaine use, smoking marijuana and respiratory infections.
"Of the triggers for heart attack studied, cocaine is the most likely to trigger an event in an individual, but traffic has the greatest population effect as more people are exposed to (it)," the researchers wrote. "PAFs give a measure of how much disease would be avoided if the risk was no longer present."
A report published late last year found that air pollution in many major cities in Asia exceeds the WHO's air quality guidelines and that toxic cocktails of pollutants results in more than 530,000 premature deaths a year.
While passive smoking was not included in this study, Nawrot said the effects of second-hand smoke were likely to be similar to that of outdoor air pollution, and noted previous research which found that bans on smoking in public places have significantly reduced heart attack rates.
British researchers said last year that a ban on smoking in public places in England led to a swift and significant drop in the number of heart attacks, saving the health service 8.4 million pounds ($13 million) in the first year.
Tim Chico, a heart specialist at the University of Sheffield who was not involved in this research, said it would help health authorities focus on which are the most important triggers.
"However, what triggers the heart attack should be considered the "last straw." The foundations of heart disease that lead to a heart attack are laid down over many years," he said in an emailed comment. "If someone wants to avoid a heart attack they should focus on not smoking, exercising, eating a healthy diet and maintaining their ideal weight."
Editing by Paul Casciato.
19 Comments so far
Show AllJust get rid of all regulations that try and preserve clean air and the market will solve everything. Right?
Some "Entrepreneur" will see an opportunity to make profit off "clean air" and implement strategies to ensure the same. Any Libertarian can tell you that.
Government and its regulations are the problem!
(Yes this sarcasm)
The government built highways and subsidized suburban housing after WW2 that led to a great increase in driving and urban sprawl. The American and European governments waged imperialist wars and intervened in other countries' politics to get their oil, without which none of these western countries would have had enough fossil fuels and the private sector would have had to turn to renewable energy sources a long time ago. The governments subsidized chemical research during the world wars which was the basis for a huge increase in the amount of chemicals used in the private sector as well. You know "better living through chemistry"? You know where those chemicals came from? They came from the government inventing new and obscene ways to mass murder people.
No the government isn't to blame at all, those libertarians are just crazy. The government is obviously the good guys.
(Yes this is sarcasm.)
". . . without which none of these western countries would have had enough fossil fuels . . . ."
Ever heard of coal?
q
What if we eat marijuana?
lol
What we have here is a false comparison. Many people breathe the foul air 24/7 all their lives. If we were to inhale cocaine 24/7 all our lives, none of us would make it past a couple of weeks old.
What you have here is an inability to read.
What an idiotic thing to say. We do not know how the chemicals being poured into OUR air affects our bodies, emotions, thoughts. I suspect the chemical companies have many studies on the dangers of the chemicals they create, kept conveniently from the public eye.
Great. Now all the cokeheads will be heading for Asian cities.
q
Wow! l bet L.A. must be the heart attack Capitol of the World with all the Coke, booze,reefer, and all those Hollywood orgies. You know something maybe l'll move west, what a way to go! No wonder "Nobody walks in L.A."
early one morning while making the rounds...
Interesting correlation: The adoption of a code of honor was considered by the founding fathers, to be essential in order to have a free society. The people of the USA have to agree to transparency, truthfulness, innocence, ... honesty. Honor is the air that we breathe.
To represent this symbolically on the United States flag, they took a patch of blue sky and placed on it a starry constellation. ..... and today, where is the honor? The "air that we breathe is totally polluted, and so is our society. Our honor has been soiled to the point that a free society cannot survive. We have to clean our air, literally and figuratively.
SHHHH, don't tell the criminal drug companies that high cholesteral is not the actual cause of heart attacks. Pollution from auto exhaust doesn't even compare to the crap we're breathing from the chemtrails. Every time the sky is heavily chemtrailed here I get heart palpitations, labored breathing and freezing cold kidneys.
One reason many are in denial of human's causing global climate change is that the world just seems so huge with endless stretches of uninhabited deserts, mountains, forests, plains and of course the sea's ..... who could the lowly human be responsible?
Well the fact that the earth may be vast left to right, front to back. It would take us almost 3 days to circumvent it flying commercial at 400 plus MPH. The real truth is that the vertical part (the part we live in) is really very shallow being only somewhat more then then 3 miles up as very few can and do live above 15000 ft. This thin envelope of life support is our most important elemental in which we would only last a few minutes before blacking out and dying. If I remember correctly pilots must use pressurized breathing devices (or be in pressurized cabin) above this level.
I have spent the last 37 years of my life here in Hawaii and I love the warmth of the ocean and air but probably the most important reason I live here is that it has some of the cleanest air and skies in the world as it is so remote from other populations. Of course that is being compromised by the world wide experiment of just how much airborne poisons we can tolerate before mankind's life expectancy falls off a cliff.
Then there is the irritation of the vog put out by our increasing volcanic activity from the big island. It seems mother nature what's to join in on the destructiveness, or maybe destroy us before we destroy everything else in this grand experimental garden of life.
The ideals embodied in the flag of the United States are difficult to fault in their substance. It is unwise to be ignorant of them, and to be cynical by tossing them out because we do not live up to them is foolish. We need to reestablish a true code of civil conduct which is upheld by all, and those who deceive it will be prosecuted by all who do uphold these ideals of honor.
We do no longer condone stealing land, so the theft from Native Americans was bad, killing the buffalo was bad, supporting Israel's settlements is bad; supporting international bankers is bad. So.. lets get it right. Its our choice.
"Dirty Air Triggers More Heart Attacks Than Cocaine"
... which is exactly why we need to spend 40 billion a year on the 'war on drugs' instead of keeping the environment clean.