Traffic Jams Triple Heart Attack Risk

Being in heavy traffic triples your risk of heart attack within one hour, a new research warns. People who have had a heart attack are likely to report having been in traffic shortly before their symptoms began. In the study of patients who had a heart attack, it was found that the patients to be more than three times as likely to have been in traffic within an hour of the onset of their heart attack. Time spent in any mode of transportation in traffic was associated with a 3.2 times higher risk than time spent away from this trigger.

Females, elderly males, patients who were unemployed and those with a history of angina were affected the most by traffic. Driving or riding in heavy traffic poses an additional risk of eliciting a heart attack in persons already at elevated risk. The patients had a known date and time of heart attack and all had survived 24 hours after the heart attack. Participants were asked what they did the day of the heart attack, where they went, the means of transportation and time spent in traffic.