Good news: Sex is safe for most heart patients. If you’re healthy enough to walk up two flights of stairs without chest pain or gasping for breath, you can have a love life.
That advice from a leading doctors’ group on Thursday addresses one of the most pressing, least discussed issues facing survivors of heart attacks and other heart patients.
In its first science-based recommendations on the subject, the American Heart Association says having sex only slightly raises the chance for a heart attack. And that’s true for people with and without heart disease.
Surprisingly, despite the higher risk for a heart patient to have a second attack, there’s no evidence that they have more sex-related heart attacks than people without cardiac disease.
Many heart patients don’t think twice about climbing stairs, yet many worry that sexual activity will cause another heart attack, or even sudden death, said Dr Glenn Levine, lead author of a report detailing the recommendations and a professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
The report says sex is something doctors should bring up with all heart patients. Yet few do because they’re uncomfortable talking about it or they lack information, Levine said. The new guidance is designed to fill that gap. Heart patients should get a doctor’s OK before engaging in sexual activity.