Posted on 12/13/2004 5:38:17 PM PST by Pharmboy
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Christmas is the deadliest day of the year for Americans with 12.4 percent more deaths than normal, researchers said on Monday.
More Americans die from heart attacks and other natural causes on Christmas, the day after and on New Year's Day than on any other days of the year, the researchers reported.
It is probably because people are feeling too busy or too festive to go to the hospital over the winter holiday season, the researchers wrote in Monday's issue of the journal Circulation.
The researchers, sociologist David Phillips of the University of California San Diego and colleagues there and at Tufts University in Boston, found a 4.65 percent increase in heart deaths and just shy of a 5 percent increase in non-heart deaths over the 14 days spanning the December holidays.
They did not count deaths from suicide, murder or accidents and took into account the perilous effects of a cold snap on health.
"We found that there is a general tendency for cardiac and noncardiac deaths to peak during the winter, but above and beyond this seasonal increase, there are additional increases in heart attack and other deaths around Christmas and New Year's," Phillips said in a statement.
In all, Phillips and colleagues counted more than 42,000 "extra" deaths during the holidays over a 26-year period. Only two years did not see this phenomenon -- 1973, when oil prices peaked and people tended not to travel, and 1981, when a severe recession also kept Americans at home.
"Of all the things we considered that might impact the increase in holiday deaths from natural causes, only two were consistent with our data," Phillips said.
"One possibility is that people tend to delay seeking care for symptoms. Another is that there are often changes in medical staff during the holidays and, consequently, the quality of medical care might be compromised."
The report fits in with a study published in March that found heart attack patients sent to hospitals during the winter holidays are more likely to die than those admitted during the rest of the year,
Clinics, emergency rooms and other health facilities do not operate at top efficiency over the holiday period, said Dr. Trip Meine, a cardiologist at Duke University in North Carolina, who led the study released at an American college of Cardiology meeting.
I work with a Viking. You guys make sense.
Awww. The liberals wishing us a Merry Christmas. How sweet.
LOL!!
Well, if we only outlawed Christmas... { /sarcasm}
I think a large part is due to the exciting lingerie that is sprung on defenseless husbands and boyfriends.
Errrr...perhaps you mean VALENTINE'S DAY???
Nick, where's your secret agent man?
I was thinking the same thing...
No, I mean Christmas, but just wait, St. Valentine's Day will be next on the list of holidays to ban, due to its religious origins and the exciting lingerie sprung on defenseless husbands and boyfrieds, killing them in a baachinalian frenzy second only to the annual Christmas massacre. ;>)
You lead an interesting life...
The subhead should read: DUmmies Hit Hardest Due To The Combination Holiday/Kerry Loss.
and Regular Days bring Death for many Americans, Too!
A lot of pigs and turkeys die too around christmas... geese too.
Notify PETA at once!! You are correct! This is frightening...
This is scary news. We should never be in fear of going to the hospital during major holidays, fearing the quality of the medical staff during those periods.
our school district did away with the little school kiddies Valentine's Day due to "self esteem enhancement" reasons.
Apparently some of the uglier kids experienced horrific psycho-trauma due to lack of real affection displayed in a Be-Mine Heart decorated with Elmer's glue and glitter.
I Remember making valentines and putting them in everybody's desk....Now it's Verbooten!
instead they'll probably come up with some hug-a-tree-day or put a condom on a cucumber drill .....
Those husbands and boyfriends haven't adapted very well. Christmas and New Year are the quietest holidays for me. We go to Vegas directly between those days and do our little thing like that. A nice 4.15 hour drive there and back. On the way back, we laugh at the people in traffic on the I-15 toward Vegas while I do 85-95 in my truck back to CA. You see, the cops are busy on the northbound lanes:) After a pee-pee and gas stop in Barstow or Mojave, we're heading south on the 14 through the mountains to a nice, queit Valley with a sense of normalcy surrounding us like a halo:)
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