Health News
Study: Heart attack risk rises with daylight-saving changes
Nov 24, 2008, 2:09 GMT
Stockholm - The risk of suffering a heart attack increases with the annual adjustment of clocks to daylight saving time, according to a Swedish study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockhom said the number of heart attacks, on average, increases by about 5 per cent during the first week of daylight-saving time that in Europe occurs on the last Sunday in March.
'There's a small increase in risk for the individual, especially during the first three days of the new week,' Dr Imre Janszky, one of the researchers said.
Likely causes were believed to be 'the disruption in the chronobiological rhythms, the loss of one hour's sleep and the resulting sleep disturbance,' he added.
Putting the clocks back in the autumn - on the last Sunday in October - helps reduce the risk somewhat, but not entirely.
'Roughly 1.5 billion people are subjected to these clock-shifts every year, but it's hard to make any generalized statement about how many heart attacks they can cause,' co-researcher Dr Rickard Ljung said.
Janszky and Ljung have studied the incidence of heart attacks since 1987 in Sweden.
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