Word: heartedly
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...Heart disease, including heart attack, is the world's No. 1 killer. A person's risk of heart attack depends mostly on a familiar repertoire of factors: exercise, smoking, diet, weight, genes. But our bodies' circadian rhythms also play a role, leaving us more prone to injury during certain hours than others. If you're guessing that the danger zone comes at the end of a stressful workday, guess again. Here to explain is Roberto Manfredini, professor of internal medicine at the University of Ferrara in Italy...
...What time of day am I most likely to have a heart attack...
...most dangerous times for heart attack and for all kinds of cardiovascular emergency - including sudden cardiac death, rupture or aneurysm of the aorta, pulmonary embolism and stroke - are the morning and during the last phase of sleep. A group from Harvard estimated this risk and evaluated that on average, the extra risk of having a myocardial infarction, or heart attack, between 6 a.m. and noon is about 40%. But if you calculate only the first three hours after waking, this relative risk is threefold...
...cardiovascular system follows a daily pattern that is oscillatory in nature: most cardiovascular functions exhibit circadian changes (circadian is from the Latin circa and diem, meaning "about one day"). Now, a heart attack depends on the imbalance between increased myocardial oxygen demand (i.e., a greater need for oxygen in your heart) and decreased myocardial oxygen supply - or both. And unfortunately, some functions in the first hours of the day require more myocardial oxygen support: waking and commencing physical activities, the peak of the adrenal hormone cortisol [which boosts blood-pressure and blood-sugar levels] and a further increase in blood...
...have to remember that blood coagulation is important in the genesis of what we call thrombi, the blood clots that can block the blood vessels and cut off supply to the heart. When we wake up, platelets, the particles in the blood that make thrombi, are particularly adhesive to the vessels. Usually we have an endogenous system - it's called fibrinolysis - to dissolve the thrombi. But in the morning, the activity of our fibrinolytic system is reduced. So we have a greater tendency to make thrombi that can occlude the coronary vessels. This contributes to further reduction of coronary blood...