A heart attack (medically known as a myocardial infarction) is a deadly medical emergency where your heart muscle begins to die because it isn’t getting enough blood flow. A blockage in the arteries that supply blood to your heart usually causes this. If a healthcare provider doesn’t restore blood flow quickly, a heart attack can cause permanent heart damage and death. Now, a new study has revealed that the most serious heart attacks are more likely to happen on a Monday.
According to the doctors at the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, who analysed data from 10,528 patients, the deadliest heart attack happened at the start of a working week. The highest rate of STEMI heart attacks occur at the beginning of the week, with the greatest rates being on Monday. ST-Segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) is a serious kind of heart attack wherein a major coronary artery gets completely blocked.
There are over 30,000 hospital admissions due to STEMI each year in the UK. It requires emergency assessment and treatment to minimise damage to the heart, and this is normally performed with emergency angioplasty – a procedure to re-open the blocked coronary artery.
Cardiologist Dr. Jack Laffan, who led the research at the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, said: “We’ve found a strong statistical correlation between the start of the working week and the incidence of STEMI. This has been described before but remains a curiosity. The cause is likely multifactorial, however, based on what we know from previous studies, it is reasonable to presume a circadian element.”
Professor Sir Nilesh Samani, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation (BHF), said: “Someone is admitted to hospital due to a life-threatening heart attack every five minutes in the UK, so it’s vital that research continues to shed light on how and why heart attacks happen. “This study adds to evidence around the timing of particularly serious heart attacks, but we now need to unpick what it is about certain days of the week that makes them more likely. Doing so could help doctors better understand this deadly condition so we can save more lives in future.”
(With inputs from ANI)
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