Sex rarely causes hearts to stop, research says

Posted on: Mon 13-11-2017

It's a familiar scene in TV melodramas: Mid-intercourse, an older man collapses, clutching his heart. Yet sex and sudden cardiac arrest rarely happen together, according to preliminary research presented Sunday at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2017.

Sudden cardiac arrest is a short circuit that occurs in the heart's electrical system, causing it to stop beating suddenly.

"On average in the US, only 10% or less actually survive a cardiac arrest," said Dr. Sumeet Chugh, senior author of the study and a professor of medicine at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles.

For the study, Chugh and his colleagues examined the lifetime medical records of all the adults who died of sudden cardiac arrest in Portland, Oregon, from 2002 through 2015.

The study needed data from an area with a large number of people, he explained.

If you follow 5,000 to 10,000 people for a year, he said, "only five or six of them will have a heart arrest. The numbers are too small. So the concept that I was fortunate enough to introduce in Portland, Oregon, was to treat the entire community as the study subjects."

Chugh and his team relied on interviews with paramedics, who have been trained to find out exactly what happened, as opposed to searching death certificates, which use codes that sometimes fail to capture cardiac arrest.

Coffee shops, ATMs may be ideal locations for defibrillators, study says

"We learn from the medics. They tell us who had a cardiac arrest, and then we go back to the time that they were born, and we get their entire records," Chugh said. When possible, the researchers talked to survivors as well.

Of the 4,557 sudden cardiac arrests identified during the study period, the researchers classified all those that occurred during or within an hour of sex as related to the act itself: 34 cases, or 0.7%. Of these, 32 were men.

Among men then, 1% of the total cardiac arrest cases were triggered by sex, while for women it was 0.1%.

The age range of the patients who suffered arrest during sex was 34 to 83. Heart problems and medications were common among the group. Only a third received cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

ABUJA: Training Schedule for Basic Life Support BLS, Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS), Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support ACLS, First Aid, CPR, AED PORTHARCOURT: Training Schedule for Basic Life Support BLS, Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS), Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support ACLS, First Aid, CPR, AED LAGOS: Training Schedule for Basic Life Support BLS, Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS), Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support ACLS, First Aid, CPR, AED STOP paying for airtime and electricity, Let your phone pay its bills with ScreenT