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| |  Researchers Find Greater Risk Of Heart Attack After A Cold LONDON, ENGLAND -- May 15, 1998 -- It is already known that death from heart attacks is more common in winter than in summer. It has been thought that the greater number of colds and flu in the winter months may be a contributory factor. The findings of a study published in this week's issue of The Lancet suggest that, following an acute respiratory-tract infection such as the common cold, there is a window of two weeks where one is at a greater risk of having a heart attack. Dr. Christoph Meier and colleagues from the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program, analysed data from general practices in the United Kingdom stored in the General Practice Research Database. The database records demographic data and characteristics of patients such as height, weight, smoking status, symptoms, diagnoses, referrals, hospital admissions and drug prescriptions from 400 general practices in the UK without the individual patients being identifiable. The study involved 9,571 patients, aged 75 years or younger. The researchers matched 7,649 controls to 1,922 patients who had received a first-time diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction. The researchers say that they cannot entirely exclude the possibility of misdiagnosis bias, in that early symptoms of heart attack were mistaken for acute respiratory-tract infection. However, they do conclude that their findings suggest that in people without a history of clinical risk factors for AMI, acute respiratory tract infections are associated with an increased risk of AMI for a period of about two weeks. "A better understanding of the role of chronic and acute infections in the aetiology of acute myocardial infarction may result in new strategies for its prevention and treatment," the researchers write.
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