Recreational B-Ball Most Likely Sport For Heart Attacks

What’s the best way to bring on a heart attack? Play some pick up basketball at your local community center. That discouraging find emerged from a study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, whose main purpose was to compare survival rates of people who had heart attacks at three different settings: traditional exercise facilities (health clubs, fitness centers), an alternative exercise facility (bowling alleys, workplace or hotel gyms, dance studio) or a non-exercise facility (banks, restaurants, shopping centers, airports).  Survival rates, by the way, were 56 percent at traditional exercise facilities, 45 percent at alternative exercise facilities and 34 percent at non-exercise facilities. Science Daily reports that the study also revealed what type of exercise people were doing when the sudden cardiac arrest occurred. The most common activity was basketball, with 20.5 percent of occurrences, followed by dancing and “working out,” both at 11.6 percent; treadmill at 8.9 percent; tennis at 6.3 percent; bowling at 5.4 percent; and swimming at 4.5 percent.