The holidays can take a toll on the heart — even if you don’t have heart problems.
Doctors see it all the time as too much food, drink and stress turn December from festive to frightening.
“The holidays are the worst time of the year” for heart health, Dr. Marc Eisenberg, a clinical cardiologist and associate professor of medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York, tells TODAY.com.
“It’s because of the salt, it’s because of travel. It’s also because alcohol can also put you into abnormal heart rhythms and can raise your blood pressure.”
What is holiday heart syndrome?
Doctors coined the term in the 1970s when they noticed people without heart disease experienced an irregular heartbeat after binge drinking and sought medical help — usually around the holidays and weekends. The episodes often involved atrial fibrillation, which can feel like the heart is beating extremely fast or skipping a beat.
“Holiday heart syndrome is a very real entity, and typically what happens is people drink more alcohol than they usually do, and it can lead to palpitations, often in the middle of the night,” Dr. Andrew Freeman, director of cardiovascular prevention and wellness at National Jewish Health in Denver, tells TODAY.com.
“Sometimes it can lead to atrial fibrillation in the middle of the night, and people end up oftentimes getting hospitalized for that.”
Holiday heart syndrome can also happen after other “meal-based celebrations,” like a birthday or wedding, says Dr. Susan Cheng, a professor of cardiology and the director of public health research in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.
“But certainly the holidays are a time when we see clusters of these cases more frequently because everybody is celebrating that particular occasion at the same time of year,” she adds.
Alcohol seems to have an immediate effect on heart rhythm, and the more people drink, the higher the risk of having an episode of atrial…
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