A cold can make your headache - and perhaps your heart too. The chances of suffering a heart attack rocket for victims of colds and flu, the researchers report in Lancet tomorrow .
For decades, experts in public health have noticed that epidemics of colds and flu in the winter are often followed by a rash of heart attacks. But the link between infections and myocardial attracted relatively little attention until the 1980s when some studies have suggested that respiratory diseases can trigger heart attacks by encouraging blood clots or inflammation heart muscle.
Now, in the largest study of its kind, Christoph Meier and colleagues at the Boston University Medical Center in Lexington, Massachusetts, found that the chances of a heart attack can almost triple after respiratory tract infection. Meier team compared the medical records of 1,922 UK heart patients with 7649 randomly selected controls. They found that patients with a respiratory infection were 2.7 times more likely to have a heart attack within 10 days of becoming ill than were controls. The weak link over time. After 16 days, a respiratory disease did not increase the risk of heart attack
The results should "ring a warning bell" for physicians and heart patients, said David Spodick, cardiologist St. Vincent's hospital and the University of Massachusetts, Worcester, who published similar studies in the 1980s, but he and Meier agree that it is too early to establish specific treatments on the discoveries. Meier, for example, warns that the study could not determine whether bacterial or viral infections pose greater risks. As studies resolve this and other issues, he cautioned, the findings "should not be used to justify the wider use of antibiotics."
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