You're More Likely To Have A Heart Attack On Monday

NEW YORK, NY — At the end of every weekend, as Sunday comes to a close and Monday nears, you can feel the stress starting to mount. You know that in the morning you'll have to wake up early, join the push and pull of the commuting masses jammed into trains or hit the crowded highways, the speed limit signs seeming to mock you as you crawl at 5 mph.

The effects of this Monday stress may be even worse than you think.

According to a new study in the American Heart Journal, you're most likely to have a heart attack on a Monday than any other day — and it's probably because of the pressure that comes with the start of the work week after two relatively stress-free days off.

"When controlling for national data on temperature, air pollution, and abroad traveling by air, the associations of calendar periods with [heart attack[ rates are surprisingly robust," said John Wallert, a Ph.D. student from Uppsala University and lead author of the study. (For more national stories, subscribe to the Across America Patch and receive daily newsletters and breaking news alerts.)

It's not just Mondays that appear to be hard on your heart. The researchers found that the winter holidays, when may people feel stress related to family gatherings, also appeared to trigger an uptick in the incidence of heart attacks.

By contrast, weekends and the summer holidays, particularly in July, showed a reduced rate of heart attack.

"We have to remember that this is an observational study and be cautious with our conclusions. The systematic variation in [heart attack] rates is likely multifactorial," Wallert warned. "With that said, it is now more probable that stress explains a substantial portion of the fluctuation over time in population [heart attack] rates than it was before our study."

So how did the researchers come to these conclusions? They used a large dataset that examined more than 156,000 incidences of heart attack, known technically as a myocardial infarction, in Swedish hospitals between the years 2006 and 2013.

"This is the first study that investigates these culturally defined time-periods in the Swedish population with unselected, high-quality data," Wallert explained. "Data allowed us to separately investigate both symptom start and hospital admission dates with predefined hypotheses. Previous studies have often lacked symptom start and discussed their results in terms of a delay in seeking appropriate care or delay of registration as explanatory for the [heart attack] rate variation over time. We found that such factors seem to explain only a part of the variation."

The effect of alternate factors, including temperature, was relatively limited.

Other research, as Wallert notes, have pointed to a link between Mondays and heart attacks, but researchers have been cautious about drawing the link to stress. Some researchers have speculated that weekend drinking might result in a spike of heart attacks on Mondays, and other studies have suggested the "Monday effect" might be found among retirees, who have been freed from the work week.

However, the new study found that the sub-group of people who were employed showed the largest spike in heart attack incidents at the beginning of the week. We also know that acutely stressful events like natural disasters can trigger cardiac incidences. All this points to stress as a key factor in heart attacks.

So if we know about the "Monday effect," what should we do about it?

"To scrap the work-week routine would probably be way too drastic," Wallert said.

He continued: "How we in society have agreed on periods of work and rest is actually quite well aligned with our predisposed, internal biological clock, the circadian rhythm."

The best idea is probably to find ways to reduce stress throughout the whole week — not just on Mondays. But maybe, at the beginning of the week, we should go a bit easier on ourselves.

Photo credit: Me-Liss-A