Heart Attack Risk: Does Having Sex Really Tax the Ol' Ticker?

Frequent sex may raise risk of heart attack in older men with heart disease.

ByABC News
March 22, 2011, 12:02 PM

March 23, 2011— -- It has become a Hollywood cliché -- the older man who clutches his chest and keels over mid-way through having sex -- but is it as real as people think? New research from Tufts Medical Center suggests that sex does increase the risk of a heart attack, but the risk is still small and only rises during and soon after doing the deed.

Researchers analyzed past studies in which heart attack victims, mostly men in their 50s and 60s, were questioned about their activities just preceding and during their coronaries to see if sex served as a trigger for their cardiac events.

While they found that sexual activity caused a 2.7 increased risk of heart attack, the overall risk of heart attack was quite small and should not dissuade those with heart disease from indulging in a little bedroom action -- especially since several other studies show that regular sexual activity (usually defined as two or more times a week) actually decreases one's risk of heart attack over time.

Lead author Dr. Issa Dahabreh says people shouldn't take the new report to mean the sex is harmful for those with heart disease "because the absolute risk is really small."

What's more, patients could battle this increased risk by being physically active on a regular basis. Regular exercise made sex and other types of physical exertion less likely to be a trigger for heart attack, the study found.

"We saw a 45 percent reduction in the relative risk of heart attack with every additional weekly exercise session," says co-author Jessica Paulus, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.

"The main take-home [is that] regular exercise training, which we should be promoting anyway as a means to improve cardio respiratory fitness…will markedly reduce the risk associated with both acute exercise/exertion as well as sexual activity," says Dr. Chip Lavie, medical director of Cardiac Rehabilitation and Prevention at John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute.