Some fans really love their football team. So much so that seeing that team make it all the way through the playoffs, win the conference championship, play in the Super Bowl, then lose, can be too much to handle. According to a new study published in the journal Clinical Cardiology, Super Bowl losses correlate with significantly higher rates of death due to cardiac arrest in both male and female fans.
Robert A. Kloner of the Heart Institute at the University of Southern California and his colleagues found that the emotional stress induced by a loss of such magnitude can spur fatal heart attacks. They determined this by comparing the rate of cardiac death after the 1980 Los Angeles Super Bowl loss with that after the 1984 Los Angeles Super bowl win, finding that the loss corresponded to 15 percent more cardiac deaths in men, 27 percent more in women, and 22 percent more in older people.
Though the study was limited in its scope - it used only two data sets - it did control for two important factors: First of all, the data sets it used corresponded to the same population only four years apart, controlling for the fact that health differs greatly between cities and populations.
The study also divorced the effects of emotional anguish over the game from the physical effects of eating far too many hot wings and chips and dip. It did this by comparing cardiac deaths after a Super Bowl loss to deaths after a Super Bowl victory , rather than to deaths in normal years.
The Pittsburg Steelers will battle the Green Bay Packers in Superbowl XLV on Feb. 6. "Physicians and patients should be aware that stressful games might elicit an emotional response that could trigger a cardiac event," Kloner said in a press release. "Stress reduction programs or certain medications might be appropriate in individual cases."
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