A study confirmed that the risk of myocardial infarction increases after a solar storm.
- Each year, approximately 12,000 people die from myocardial infarction.
- In times of intense geomagnetic disturbances, patients with coronary heart disease had a higher risk of heart attack.
This is a primordial event in the activity of the Sun. The solar storm, also called “solar flare”, corresponds to the sudden release of energy on the surface of the Sun, lasting a few minutes to a few tens of minutes, in the form of energetic matter and electromagnetic waves.
Heart rate dysregulation
According to a study published in the journal Science of The Total Environment, the solar storm can cause heart rate dysregulation and increase the risk of heart attack. In order to reach this conclusion, American and Swedish researchers evaluated the impact of solar and geomagnetic activity and intense geomagnetic disturbances on the heart rate variability of 809 men with an average age of 75 years.
“An almost immediate effect”
“We found an almost immediate effect of the continuous and higher planetary K-index on the reduction of heart rate variability for exposures up to 24 h before the recording of the electrocardiogram”, can we read in the works. Clearly, solar and geomagnetic activity increased the risk of suffering from a myocardial infarction. The associations remained similar after accounting for air pollutants during the exposure window preceding the event.
“This is the first study to demonstrate the potential negative effects of geomagnetic activity on reduced heart rate variability in a large epidemiological cohort over an extended period, which may have important clinical implications among different populations.” , concluded the authors.
