In the United States, hospitalizations for cardiovascular disease almost doubled in the two days following the 2016 presidential election in which Donald Trump was elected.
- The number of heart attacks soared by 67% and the number of strokes by 59% in the two days following the 2016 US election.
- Researchers have suggested that everyday stress creates a chain reaction from our brain to the heart causing heart attacks.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was not good news for Americans. Two days after his election, hospitalizations for cardiovascular disease, both strokes and heart attacks, more than doubled. This was noted by American researchers from the Harvard University School of Public Health and Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest nonprofit medical organizations. They published their results on October 12 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
More heart attacks than strokes
The results showed that the rate of cardiovascular disease hospitalizations in Southern California was 1.62 times higher in the two days following the 2016 election than on the same two days the week before the election. “This is a wake-up call for all healthcare professionals, prompting us to pay greater attention to the ways in which the stress of political campaigns, rhetoric and election results can directly harm health.”, estimates David Williams, professor of public health at Harvard Chan School and co-author of the study.
Hospitalizations for cardiovascular diseases increased by 61% in the two days following the 2016 US election. In detail, the number of heart attacks rose by 67% and the number of strokes by 59%. “In our diverse patient population that reflects all of Southern California, we found that heart attack risk increased after the 2016 election, regardless of gender, age, and racial/ethnic groups.”, added Matthew Mefford of Kaiser Permanente and lead author of the study.
A chain reaction
The influence of daily stress on cardiovascular accidents has already been proven. A study published on January 11, 2017 in the journal The Lancet found that everyday stress increases heart risk. An increase in activity, for example, has been associated with a 1.6 times higher risk of a cardiovascular incident. Researchers have suggested that this is due to a chain reaction in our body. It all starts in the amygdala, located in the brain, which increases its activity. This causes a signal to produce white blood cells to be sent to the spinal cord, which responds by sending them to the arteries. They then clump together in the form of a plaque, which causes atherosclerosis. This inflammation is then at the origin of cardiovascular incidents.
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