The Doctor Weighs In

By Pat Salber

When I was a practicing Emergency Physician, I always used to volunteer to work Super Bowl Sunday. Two reasons: 1) I could care less about football, and 2) It is the one day of the year when no one, and I mean no one, comes to the ER. Whole families on their second week of a cold show up on Christmas Eve. Folks drop by to have their skin rashes checked out on Thanksgiving Day. New Years Eve and New Years Day – busy, busy, busy. But Super Bowl Sunday, while the Super Bowl is on, is dead quiet.

If you talk to emergency physicians, they all have stories about the guy who got chest pain during the first quarter, but held out, sweating and breathing hard, until the game was over. By the time this fellow actually showed up in the ED, his heart muscle had been starved for oxygen for quite some time and the damage was worse than it would have been if he had shut off the TV and dialed 911.

Turns out, according to a study presented at last year’s American College of Emergency Physicians’ 37^th annual scientific session, that some guys (and it is mostly guys), do delay seeking emergency care if they are watching a game. Dr. David Jerrard of the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore and colleagues tracked ER visits over a three year period during and immediately after 800 postseason professional football games, major league baseball games, or Division l college football or basketball games. They found that on the days that games were televised, more men were seen in the 4 hours following the event than were seen during the same 4-hour period on nongame days.

An internet report on the study published on Daily News Central quoted Dr. Jerrard as saying, “Men should not risk their health by putting off going to the emergency room because they want to see the final results of a football game. It could be the last game they ever see."

A more recent article, titled “Super Bowl Could Be Heart Health Hazard,” describes the results of another research study. The investigators looked at cardiac events in Germany (greater Munich area) during the World Cup competition in Germany in the summer of 2006. They analyzed results from 4,279 patients. The results showed that cardiac emergencies were more than double the norm on the seven days when the German team played – it was triple for men. The effect was the strongest for people with known heart disease. Ok, this study looked at soccer fans soccer…I believe we can extrapolate the results to American football fans as well...are they any less rabid?

Considering the learnings of these two studies together, leads me to make two recommendations:

• If you have known heart disease, be sure you take your cardiac meds (including aspirin if prescribed) and have your nitroglycerin handy.
• If you get chest pain (or any other serious symptoms) during the game, get yourself to the ER.

Chances are the game is going to be on all of the TV sets in the hospital anyway so you probably won’t miss much. Besides, you can always record it or watch the recaps on ESPN. I am willing to bet that if your problem turns out to be serious, you probably won’t really care who won or lost the game anyway.