There are certain things you’re not supposed to do during sex and having a heart attack is one of them. We’ve known for a while that bursts of moderate to  intense physical activity—including sex—increase heart attack risk, but a few scientists have now put number on that risk. And especially for out-of-shape folks, the diagnosis doesn’t look good (unless you’re aiming for death by sex, of course).

Studying death and sex is a tricky subject: Scientists can’t just round up volunteers, watch them make love, and then note which ones die. So instead they analyzed data from 14 different studies to single out connections between sex, exercise, and the risk of cardiac death or heart attacks.

As the researchers wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Acute cardiac events were significantly associated with … sexual activity.” When exercising, you’re 3.5 times more likely to get a heart attack, and when having sex (or immediately after sex), you’re 2.7 times more likely.

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What to you do if a doctor says your heart’s aortic root had ballooned to nearly two inches, and that a heart attack is imminent unless you receive a mechanical valve–a fix that requires blood-thinning drugs for the rest of one’s life? Easy–just invent your own heart implant.

This was the scenario facing Tal Golesworthy in 2000. An engineer from Tewkesbury, England, Golesworthy has the same tissue disorder that afflicts over 12,000 people in the UK: Marfan syndrome. But Golesworthy decided that the valve wasn’t his only option. As The Engineer reports:

What excited him was the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computer-aided design (CAD). He believed that by combining these technologies with rapid prototyping (RP) techniques he could manufacture a tailor-made support that would act as an internal bandage to keep his aorta in place…. “It seemed to me to be pretty obvious that you could scan the heart structure, model it with a CAD routine, then use RP to create a former on which to manufacture a device,” explained Golesworthy. “In a sense, conceptually, it was very simple to do. Actually engineering that was significantly more complex.”

The main difficulty was that the scanners had trouble imaging his beating heart, and since you can’t tell your heart to “hold still” for the camera, Golesworthy did the next best thing: he created multiple images of his heart at the same cardiac cycle. With CAD helping him design the implant, the next obstacle was how to translate a digital design to a workable heart implant. As The Engineer reports:

The team looked at a number of different processes, such as 3D embroidery, but ended up using a standard medical polymer, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) in a textile solution that allowed them to form a mesh directly onto the former. The mesh weighed less than 5g, was an exact fit for the ascending aorta and could be sutured into place by the surgeon. The process, from proposal to final product, took just under two years.

All the while, Golesworthy was working against the clock, knowing that a heart attack could rear its head at any point. From The Engineer:

“My aorta was dilating all through that period,” said Golesworthy. “When you’ve got the scalpel of Damocles hanging over your sternum, it motivates you into making things happen and so they do…”

And they did. Golesworthy created his implant and surgeons implanted it into his heart in 2004. Since then 23 other patients have had the same surgery, and the implant has the potential to become the standard for valve-surgery in the coming years–all thanks to a man who could have died from a big heart, but instead decided to share it.

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Men diagnosed with erectile dysfunction probably wouldn’t be too keen to hear that they might have bigger problems, but a new study in the journal Circulation reinforces that unfortunate idea. Given that both ED and heart attacks can result from restricted arteries that prevent blood from flowing freely, doctors have long suspected that they might be connected. Now, the study says, there’s evidence that one precedes the other. From The Los Angeles Times:

The results are probably not too surprising, added Dr. Robert Kloner, a cardiologist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, “because arteries in the penis are smaller, so atherosclerosis shows up there sooner,” perhaps three to four years before the onset of cardiovascular disease.

The take-home message, both experts said, is that when a patient seeks treatment for ED, typically from a general practitioner, he should be given a full physical work-up to look for heart disease and referred to a cardiologist.

The guidelines for treating men with ED already state that they should be examined for cardiac problems. Kloner says updated guidelines in a few years could make that recommendation more forceful, so doctors can make sure a penis attack doesn’t become a heart attack.

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Not that we need an excuse to eat chocolate, but if you’ve had a heart attack, you may want to grab the Ghirardelli. Scientists know that eating dark chocolate (not milk—that’s the obesity-feeder) can reduce person’s risk of stroke and heart disease. Now researchers have found that eating chocolate can increase a person’s chances of survival after they’ve suffered a heart attack.

In the Journal of Internal Medicine, Boston researchers published a study finding that when people who’d had a heart attack ate chocolate two to three times a week, they significantly reduced their risk of dying from heart disease.

The scientists studied over 1,000 non-diabetic Swedish men and women between the ages of 45 and 70, all of whom had suffered from a heart attack in the 1990s. They were asked about their diet over the past year and about how much chocolate they ate. The researchers compared their heath exam from the three months after their initial hospital stay to their condition eight years later. They found that “the incidence of fatal heart attacks correlated inversely with the amount of chocolate consumed.”

So what’s the secret in dark chocolate? The researchers believe the antioxidants in cocoa keep free radicals from damaging cells the body. Plus it tastes so darn good.

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Image: flickr/ eszter

Emergency rooms will be a little emptier next Monday because the end of daylight savings time appears to reduce the chances of getting a heart attack. A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found a small but consistent dip in the number of heart attacks on the Monday after “Fall back,” probably due to people getting an extra hour of shut-eye.

The Swedish researchers found the pattern after going through 20 years of data, from 1987 to 2006. They compared the days directly following the time shifts with the same day two weeks before and two weeks after, and found a 5 percent decrease in heart attacks on the Monday following the fall time shift. But the flip side of “Fall back” is “Spring forward,” where heart attacks increase in the few days after the time shift. The first Monday and Wednesday after “Spring forward” had a 6 percent rise in heart attacks, and the first Tuesday had a 10 percent increase. (If you’re reading this in the Southern Hemisphere, take care, because the time shift for you this weekend is actually “Spring forward.”)

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