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During last February’s Olympic games in Vancouver, almost 17 million Canadians – well over half our population – watched Canada beat the U.S.A. in the men’s hockey gold medal final. Compare that to barely 7 million of us who watched this year’s Super Bowl XLV. We are a hockey-mad country indeed. Go Canada!
But getting too excited about our Canucks in the playoffs could actually be psychologically and physically damaging. A new UCLA study warns that a loss by the hometown team in an important game can lead to “increased deaths in both men and women, and especially older patients.”
Researchers reporting in the medical journal Clinical Cardiology found that total and cardiac mortality rates in Los Angeles County increased for both men and women immediately after the city’s 1980 Rams’ Super Bowl loss, but there was an overall reduction in total mortality – especially in older people and females – after the 1984 Raiders’ win four years later.
One of the UCLA study authors even said in a press release that “stress reduction programs might be appropriate in individual cases.”
But winning or losing may not be the only factor worth considering. An earlier study published in the New England Journal of Medicine examined heart attack trends among Germans during the 2006 World Cup compared to other times of the year.
They found that on days the German football team played, cardiac emergencies more than tripled for men and nearly doubled for women. How the team played, the overall importance of the soccer match, and whether the winner was determined by a shootout all affected fans’ heart risks.
Read the rest of this article, including four handy home-treatment psychotherapy guidelines to help the sports fan "patient" in your house!
