This article is from the WebMD Medical News Archive

Oct. 20, 2004 -- Don't blame road rage. Traffic triggers heart attacks, a German study shows.

Yes, it appears a heart attack is imminent for the beefy guy with the red face shouting from his SUV, but what hurts our hearts isn't seething in traffic -- it's breathing in traffic, says Harvard researcher Peter H. Stone, MD. He is the co-director of the cardiac unit at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

"This is totally more due to air pollution than to stress," Stone tells WebMD. "When driving, we are so used to thinking that the principal health jeopardy is from rage, but that is not true at all."

Stone's editorial in the Oct. 21 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine accompanies a study by Annette Peters, PhD, of the GSF-National Research Center for Environment and Health, Neuherberg, Germany, and colleagues.

Peters' team interviewed nearly 700 people who survived for at least 24 hours after having a heart attack. During the hour before their heart attacks, they were more likely to have been in traffic than at any other hour of the day. Twelve percent of the heart attacks occurred within an hour of being in traffic. Analysis of the data showed that 8% of the heart attacks were directly linked to traffic exposure.

Yes, most of the heart attack victims were exposed to the stress of driving. But some were exposed to traffic while riding on streetcars or buses -- and their traffic risk was just as high as that of the drivers. Moreover, people rushing to work had slightly fewer traffic-related heart attacks than women, unemployed people, and retirees.

"If these findings can be replicated -- if this is really true -- we might have been underestimating the short-term risk of air pollution," Peters tells WebMD. "Most air pollution studies rely on 24-hour averages from ambient air monitors not influenced by traffic. But for people who spend a considerable time in traffic, their personal exposure might be much higher."

It's not the first time researchers have linked traffic air pollution to heart attacks.

"Many studies in the past have looked at passive bystanders to traffic, like highway patrolmen and gas station attendants," Stone says. "They have an increased cardiovascular event rate and increased jeopardy simply due to their proximity to traffic. It is not driving that increases their risk, but the additional element of exposure to particulate matter and gasses related to traffic."

Next: How Air Pollution From Traffic Causes Heart Attacks

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