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How Snow Shoveling Kills: It’s The Cold, Not Just The Snow

Yes, shoveling snow is hard on the heart, but that stress is jacked up even more by another factor that usually accompanies snow: cold air. Researchers at Penn State have learned that breathing cold air during exercise can cause uneven oxygen distribution throughout the heart. And while healthy hearts generally correct the oxygen distribution, a weaker heart–as in a person with coronary heart disease –could be put at risk.  A Penn State news release reports that researchers at the school studied healthy young adults (in their 20s) and then studied a group of healthy older adults (in their 60s) so that they could learn how the heart functions in people without disease. The study participants did an isometric handgrip to increase blood pressure for two minutes, providing a consistent workload on the heart for the researchers to measure. What did they find? While cold air produced a supply-demand mismatch in the left ventricle — where the heart receives oxygenated blood — healthy hearts continued to function appropriately, something that is believed not to be case with diseased hearts. “There are two different things going on here — demand and supply,” said Matthew D. Muller, postdoctoral fellow at the Heart and Vascular Institute, Penn State College of Medicine. “We thought that oxygen demand in the heart would be higher with cold-air breathing and we also thought that oxygen supply would be a little bit impaired. And that’s generally what we found.” Read more from Penn State. Read the original study here.

 

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