Sexual intercourse, generally speaking, is very safe for the heart. It’s possible it may even be good for you. But some people do die of heart attacks or sudden cardiac arrest during sex. And almost all of those people are older married men cheating on their wives with younger women in unfamiliar surroundings.
I came across this fact while reading Heart 411: The Only Guide to Heart Health You’ll Ever Need, by Marc Gillinov and Steven Nissen, both high-ranking cardiologists at the Cleveland Clinic. They wrote:
Men with coronary heart disease do need to follow the rules. When heart attacks occur during or after sex, they almost always involve older men I extramarital affairs with young women. For those men, it would have been safer to stay at home and burn off excess energy on a treadmill in the basement.
Woah. Skeptical, I wrote Nissen, best known for stirring up controversy over drugs like GlaxoSmithKline‘s Avandia and Merck‘s Vioxx (both now withdrawn), and asked him to back that statement up with some data. Almost instantly, he sent me two scientific papers.
The first was this paper, a scientific statement from the American Heart Association on sexual activity and cardiovascular disease:
In an autopsy report of 5559 instances of sudden death, 34 (0.6%) reportedly occurred during sexual intercourse.34 Two other autopsy studies reported similarly low rates (0.6%–1.7%) of sudden death related to sexual activity.35,36 Of the subjects who died during coitus, 82% to 93% were men, and the majority (75%) were having extramarital sexual activity, in most cases with a younger partner in an unfamiliar setting and/or after excessive food and alcohol consumption. The increase in absolute risk of sudden death associated with 1 hour of additional sexual activity per week is estimated to be <1 per 10 000 person-years.30
He also sent this paper on the association of sex with cardiac events.
So sudden cardiac death during sex is extremely rare, but when it happens, the claim about extramarital sexual activity holds true. That’s one more reason to stay in shape, because that will decrease risk overall. It’s also one more reason to heed the dictum coined by actor Paul Newman: Don’t go out for a hamburger when you’ve got the steak at home. And if you do, make sure you’re taking your Lipitor.
Forbes
