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MONDAY, Oct. 5, 2020 (HealthDay News)<\/p>\n
If your husband or wife is hospitalized in intensive care, you’re more likely to have a heart attack<\/a> or other serious heart<\/a> problem in the next few weeks, a new study warns.<\/p>\n “Spouses of ICU patients should pay attention to their own physical health, especially in terms of cardiovascular disease<\/a>,” said senior author Dr. Hiroyuki Ohbe, a Ph.D. student in the School of Public Health at the University of Tokyo.<\/p>\n Researchers analyzed data from a large Japanese database to compare more than 7,800 spouses of patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) for more than two days with a random group of more than 31,000 others.<\/p>\n The average age of the spouses was 54 and 65% were women.<\/p>\n Compared to others, those with a spouse in the ICU had increased odds of an event such as chest pain<\/a>, heart attack<\/a>, stroke<\/a>, irregular heart<\/a> rhythm, heart failure<\/a> or a blood clot<\/a> in the lungs<\/a> (pulmonary embolism<\/a>) within a month.<\/p>\n The spouses also had a higher risk of being hospitalized for heart disease<\/a> and severe heart events, according to the study published Oct. 5 in the journal Circulation<\/i>.<\/p>\n Researchers described the study as the first to suggest that having a spouse in the ICU may put people at risk in this way.<\/p>\n “The ICU can be a stressful environment with significant caregiving<\/a> burdens, and spouses may face tough decisions about continuing or ending life-sustaining treatment,” Ohbe noted. “A patient’s admission to ICU puts acute psychological stress<\/a> on family members, and that stress<\/a> may increase the risk for cardiovascular disease<\/a> particularly for the other spouse.”<\/p>\n More research is needed to confirm the findings and to assess whether changes in living arrangements, eating habits, alcohol<\/a> consumption and economic support play a role in this increased risk.<\/p>\n — Robert Preidt<\/p>\n![\"MedicalNews\"](\"https:\/\/images.medicinenet.com\/images\/HealthDay\/healthday.png\")
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