Super Bowl excitement might be hazardous

The Associated Press

For rabid fans of the New York Giants and New England Patriots, this Sunday’s Super Bowl won’t be just a game.

The game in Arizona may be a health hazard.

Heart attacks and other cardiac emergencies doubled in Munich, Germany, when that nation’s soccer team played in World Cup matches, a new study reports.

While history suggests European soccer fans can get a bit more worked up than the average American football fan, doctors think there are some valid warnings to be shared.

“I know a little bit about the Super Bowl,” study author Dr. Gerhard Steinbeck of Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich said in a telephone interview. “It’s reasonable to think that something quite similar might happen.”

He and his colleagues present their results in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine. They blamed emotional stress for the heart problems, but they note that lack of sleep, overeating, wolfing down junk food, boozing and smoking might have played a role as well.

Previous studies suggest that events like earthquakes and war can boost the risk of heart problems. Findings for soccer have been inconsistent.

The new work “confirms something people have been highly skeptical about ... that soccer (would) produce that kind of emotional investment that might trigger a heart attack,” said psychologist Douglas Carroll of the University of Birmingham in England.

The effect was strongest in people with known heart disease. So on Super Bowl Sunday, such people and others with known risks for heart disease — like high blood pressure or diabetes — should take extra care of themselves, said Dr. Lori Mosca, director of preventive cardiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.