Driving

A heart attack could strike at any moment, and there have been several cases of people experiencing one while driving a car, although driving in itself is unlikely to be a trigger.

Heart attacks may have few or no symptoms, but if you experience nausea and chest pains, especially ones that travel down to your arms and upwards to your jaw, prepare youself for the worst. You should act quickly and decisively – you may only have a minute before you lose consciousness.

Pull the car over and immediately dial for emergency services, detailing your location. Don’t hesitate or make any other phone calls first – if you lose consciousness, you’ll need to be revived as soon as possible to avoid brain damage and irreparable damage to the heart, so it’s not worth delaying to make sure or because of possible embarrassment.

There is an unproven theory that you can help lengthen the time you keep yourself conscious by breathing deeply and then coughing about once every two seconds, almost mimicing the actions of CPR. There’s no evidence to substantiate the claim as it’s very difficult to test in an emergency situation, but in theory it works and may be worth a try while you wait for help.

Driving during a heart attack is extremely dangerous for both the driver and anyone else on the road, even if you feel fine. Yet seven per cent of men having a heart attack drive themselves to hospital, and only 60 per cent arrive by ambulance – mostly due to embarrassment. The research published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing also reveals that women take five times longer to go to hospital than men after their symptoms start, usually because they are embarrassed.

Exercise

Many people experience heart attacks and even sudden death while exercising. Some studies have found that up to 10 percent of heart attacks happen while people are exercising.

You can reduce your risk of this happening to you by… exercising! If you make sure you get a regular dose of moderate exercise every few day or so, you’ll avoid your heart going into shock when you do finally chop some wood or shovel some snow.

Make sure you don’t overtrain though; although exercise-triggered heart attacks are generally found among people who are unfit, even those who do endurance training regularly and are not doing anything particularly strenuous are at risk.

In fact, research suggests that while doing moderate exercises lowers your heart attack risk, doing extreme endurance exercise does the opposite. So if you exercise enough to burn off somewhere between around 500 and 2000 calories a week (not too much of a challenge for a fit, healthy person) you’ll reap the benefit, but anything over that could actually have a negative effect. Instead, several experts suggest strength training, which controls blood pressure and trains the body to deal with the type of short, sharp stretches of exertion that are usually responsible for heart attacks.