Super Bowl Stress Can Raise Heart Deaths in Football Fans, Study Finds
Super Bowl Stress Can Raise Hearet Deaths in Fans
Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images
This is the first study to show an increase in cardiac events in women associated with the Super Bowl.
This is the first study to show an increase in cardiac events in women associated with the Super Bowl. Photographer: Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images
The stress that sports fans feel when their team loses a key game at home may, in some cases, trigger heart-related deaths, say researchers who studied data involving a pair of past Super Bowls.
The finding, reported in the journal Clinical Cardiology the week before the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers play in Super Bowl XLV, suggests that when the home team loses in the most important game of the season, it may spur higher heart-related events that lead to deaths.
In the 1980 Super Bowl, when the Los Angeles Rams hosted the Steelers and lost in a “high intensity” contest with seven lead changes, death rates rose by 27 percent in women and 15 percent in men, the study found. In 1984, when the Los Angeles Raiders beat the Washington Redskins in a game played in Tampa, Florida, there was a trend in Los Angeles toward fewer deaths, though it wasn’t statistically significant.
“Physicians and patients should be aware that that stressful games might elicit an emotional response that could trigger a cardiac event,” said Robert Kloner, the study’s lead author, in a statement.
Stress is known to play a role in heart illness, and the report, the first on the Super Bowl, follows data suggesting World Cup soccer losses boosted cardiac events in men.
Kloner, a professor of medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, and his colleagues counted deaths that occurred on the day of the two past Super Bowls and for 14 days after, comparing them with deaths that occurred at all other times in January and February of those years.
1980 Game
Older people fared worse than those younger after the 1980 game, which took place in Pasadena, California, with a 22 percent increase in circulatory deaths.
This is the first study to show an increase in cardiac events in women associated with the Super Bowl, the researchers said. The differences between deaths in men and women in deaths wasn’t statistically significant, the authors wrote. Women may respond emotionally to the Super Bowl loss because they, like the men, care about football, or because they are negatively affected by a partner who is upset about a loss, the authors wrote.
Last year’s Super Bowl was the most-watched television program in the U.S. ever, with 106.5 million viewers, according to the Nielsen Co., which provides ratings of what consumers watch.
To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Lopatto in New York at elopatto@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net.
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