Heart Attacks And Accidents: There Is A Link

When it comes to heart attacks, we tend to think that they are only caused by health or by genetics, or by long term health habits. But many don’t realize that more and more science is finding a connection between accidents, and heart attacks. In fact, research is showing that people in accidents are not only more likely to suffer a heart attack, but may even be more likely than others to suffer heart attacks years in the future.

Six Months and Beyond

Many studies have shown that when you look at accident victims six months after an accident, and compare them to control groups who were not in accidents, the accident victims had a much higher rate of heart attacks. That increase continues, even if you look years in the future, when compared to those who were not in accidents.

This increase isn’t just with heart attacks either—it also includes cardiac arrests. Unlike heart attacks, which normally don’t happen to younger people, cardiac arrest is not age-specific, and many people, including young healthy athletes, can suffer cardiac arrest.

Causation Problems in Court

The problem with attributing a heart attack or other similar cardiac event (like cardiac arrest) to an accident, is causation.

Juries, as part of the general public, have become so conditioned to believe that heart attacks are not caused by sudden “events,” it can be hard to get a jury to believe that an accident caused a heart attack.

Couple this with the problem of those in accidents who may be elderly, or in poor health; many of them may already have risk factors for heart attacks even without any accident, thus giving a Defendant the argument to say that the victim “would have had the heart attack anyway,” even in the absence of an accident.

In heart attack or cardiac event cases, Defendants will often pull a victim’s medical history, to pinpoint warning signs of heart disease, to try to pin the heart attack on that, rather than the accident.

And because heart attacks following accidents usually aren’t immediate, the time between the accident and the heart attack, makes it easy for Defendants to claim there is no causation between the two.

Why the Connection?

Science doesn’t know exactly why there is such a connection between heart attacks and accidents, but they reason that it is actually pretty simple: stress. That’s the emotional toll of accidents, and the fear and uncertainty that injury and mounting bills create, but it’s also the stress on the body itself.

As it is coping with pain, disability, rehabilitation, and in some cases, continuing medical procedures in the process of recovery, the heart is stressed, and for some, that can be a triggering event leading to a cardiac event.

Heart attack-or any injury–after an accident? Contact our Rhode Island injury lawyers at Robert E. Craven & Associates at 401-453-2700 today.

Sources:

bumc.bu.edu/busm/2019/05/23/heart-failure-stroke-greater-among-occupants-in-motor-vehicle-accidents/

thorax.bmj.com/content/thoraxjnl/36/11/811.full.pdf