When it rains, it pours! As if it isn’t draining enough to reassemble the pieces of a broken heart, a new study shows that a person with a grieving heart is far more likely to suffer a heart attack than someone who has a nice happy heart.

These results are the first to compare how grief affects a person’s risk of heart disease, and they are absolutely startling! Studies in the past have noted that people who have lost loved ones tend to have more heart problems than those who haven’t.

“We compared these patients’ losses in the recent past of the last day or week before their heart attack to the loss we would have expected to see based on their loss [pattern] over the past six months,” says Mostofsky. “People who have a heart attack are more likely to have lost a person in the recent past than would have been expected based on the number they lost over the past six months to a year.”

The fact that someone grieving was facing a higher risk of heart attack wasn’t too much of a shocker, but finding out just how much more at risk they were was frightening. The day after you lose a loved one your chances of a heart attack increase 21-fold and the week after leaves you six-times more likely of having a heart attack!

So, the next time you suffer a loss, in addition to coping with life without a loved one, you will also have to worry about the unsettling increase in your odds of having a heart attack!

 

Sources: Time

Photo Source: watcharakun, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Tags: studies, research, science, coping, loss, grieving, patients, heart, disease, heart attack, risk
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