Home » Electoral challenges hurt the heart

Electoral challenges hurt the heart

by admin

Remember the US presidential elections of the penultimate round with the challenge between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? For months we have seen twists and turns, reversed forecasts, chasing news on social media, furious controversies, conflicting polls, face to face. If on this side of the ocean we have followed with great attention what was happening, in the States the emotional participation of citizens in verbal skirmishes and victories / defeats, as in a football match, could have represented a strongly “stressful” stimulus for the heart. . The observations on the wearers of implantable devices to record and counteract any arrhythmias say so. The result of all these emotional upheavals and the positions taken by the “supporters”, with consequent discharges of stress hormones (with a potential impact on any hypertension present), could also have influenced the regularity of the beats, paving the way for phenomena arrhythmias or worsening the situation in those who already suffered from arrhythmia. To put pen to paper this association, even without identifying a precise cause-effect relationship, is a research coordinated by Lindsey A. Rosman, of the division of cardiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, appeared on Journal of the American  Heart Association.

American experts examined all heart rhythm records in nearly 2,500 North Carolina people, with an average age of around 70, who had defibrillators or pacemakers with sending signals from a distance. The “field” of observation was the whole of North Carolina, an important state for the American voting model, in which the presidential campaign of the two sides was concentrated. The information deriving from the “devices” was then examined for six weeks (from 15 days before to a month after the elections) in 2016, comparing what was observed with the same period between June and July of the same year. In the first period of control, 1533 arrhythmic events were observed, against 2592 recorded at the turn of the presidential elections. The increased risk of the total incidence of arrhythmias both in the sense of slowing of the rate (bradycardia) and of increased speed of the beats (tachycardia) was 77%. Even higher was the percentage increase in arrhythmias of the atria, the upper chambers of the heart where the most common rhythm disturbance, atrial fibrillation, develops: we reached 82%. As for arrhythmias affecting the ventricles, potentially correlated in some cases with cardiac arrest, the increased risk was 60%. All this, it must be said, without there being any particular associations linked to sex, age, ethnicity, implanted heart device. According to the experts, it must be said, there would not be a particular risk related to the political position of the people observed, as if to say that it does not matter whether the party (in this case the candidate) has won or lost.

See also  Clinical research, in 2022 Italy will lose a quarter of the trials

Heart door

For those with a defibrillator, beware of anxiety and depression

at Federico Mereta


In fact, the study correlated health data with public information deriving from the State Electoral Council, to assess whether there was a relationship between political tendency, candidate’s victory / defeat and precisely arrhythmic phenomena. The result was all too clear: there was no higher incidence of arrhythmia among the individuals who voted for the losing candidate. In practice, therefore, it would be the emotional participation and the tendency to anxiously follow the news after day, more than the same result, to induce a situation of emotional stress such as to represent a “spring” for upsetting the normal heart rhythms.

Stress and heart, this is what happens after a heart attack

.

You may also like

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Read More

Privacy & Cookies Policy