I don’t know about you, but I found the England versus Slovenia match pretty stressful to watch. The last 20 minutes seemed to last hours and my heart was pounding away. In a previous blog (‘It’s been emotional’, May 19), I wrote about some research carried out in the UK and published in the British Medical Journal, showing a significant increase in hospital admissions for heart attacks during the 1998 World Cup. The researchers concluded that heart attacks can be triggered by emotional upset, such as watching your national football team lose an important match. Well, that particular study was British. I thought I would look at whether this is a peculiarly English phenomenon or whether there was similar evidence among other the supporters of other football obsessed nations, and more specifically, the supporters of England’s last opponents – Germany. And as it happens, there is!
A group of German medics led by Dr. Ute Wilbert-Lampen from Munich, published a paper in a 2008 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. They recorded every emergency “cardiovascular event” in the greater Munich area during the 2006 World Cup (basically a proxy measure of heart attacks) They then compared the number of heart attacks that occurred during the World Cup with the number of heart attacks both before and after the World Cup, as well as control data from the same period in other years (when there was no World Cup). Overall, the research team assessed 4,279 cases of suspected heart attacks in all their variants.
On match days involving the German team, the incidence of cardiac emergencies was over two-and-a-half times greater than during the control period. The effect was even greater among men. On match days involving the German team, men were over three times more likely to have a heart attack whereas women were nearly twice as likely to have a heart attack. No significant effects on cardiovascular health were found among Germans who watched other World Cup games during the same period. They also found that those patients who had a prior heart disorder (i.e., coronary heart disease [CHD]) were much more likely to suffer heart attacks. Of the patients they assessed, almost half of the patients that had heart attacks on World Cup days involving Germany had CHD (47%) whereas only 29% of patients assessed during the control period had CHD. They also found that on World Cup match days, the highest average incidence of heart attacks was during the first two hours after each match had kicked off.
Based on these results, Dr Wilbert-Lampen and his team concluded that viewing a stressful soccer match more than doubles the risk of a heart attack – particularly in men. They also concluded that men with CHD should take preventative measures. Therefore, not watching the matches involving Germany would appear to be the safest option. The research also seems to indicate that the most important aspect for triggering a stress-induced event is not whether the game was won or lost but the intense strain and excitement experienced during the viewing of a dramatic match such as those that end with a penalty shoot-out. Thankfully this weekend it will be the German supporters that have to think about their hearts and not us.
Professor Mark Griffiths, psychologist, Nottingham Trent University
To speak to Professor Griffiths, call the University Press Office directly on 0115 848 8782 or email worldcup@ntu.ac.uk
[To view Nottingham Trent University’s team of World Cup experts go to www.ntu.ac.uk/worldcup]
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